


Artifice

by buttpatrol



Category: Wolf 359 (Radio)
Genre: After Hephestus, Body Dysphoria, Dialogue Heavy, Etymology, Hera in different bodies, Hera trying to extend her limited frame of reference a messy organism filled planet, I promise i will actually try to resolve romantic tension this time, Literal Body Modification, Mad Science, Multi, Navel-Gazing, Original Character(s), Rebuilding, Robot Feels, Robot Social Justice, Robot/Human Relationships, Trans Character, background Lovelace being a boss, robot politics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-03
Updated: 2016-04-05
Packaged: 2018-04-29 18:13:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 10
Words: 23,231
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5137679
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buttpatrol/pseuds/buttpatrol
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A story told in parts about colour palettes, identity, robot uprisings, sensational trials, space, and messy love.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

> I usually feel the need to preface my fics with some sort of vague apology for the piece. But this one is a story I wrote for me. I am not sure why I identify with the AI character over all other, and what that says about me. I wanted to shove all those feeling in a big complicated piece about what could come after they make it back to earth, maybe a little broken, but alive all the same. #SorryNotSorry
> 
> Except about possible grammar/spelling mistakes. Then #SorrySoSorry

**1**

“Can you state your name for the record?”

“Isabel Lovelace. L-O-V-E-L-A-C-E”

“Do you understand why we have asked you to come before this committee?”

“Yes”

“Thank you, Captain Lovelace. In the past few weeks a substantial bit of evidence has be brought forward pertained to allegations of illegal and unethical activities by your former employer, Goddard Futuristics. What was your involvement?”

“I was the captain… the first captain of the USS Hephaestus. A small scale research space station orbiting the red dwarf star Wolf 359.”

“And when did you first think things were… Not as they _should_ be on this mission?”

The camera cut to a wide shot of Lovelace. Her crisp white suit, and ramrod straight posture made her look like a beacon in the warm hazy light of the courtroom. She looked the heavy-set, pale man heading the inquiry in eye. “Right away, there were a lot of oddities to the mission but it was until crew members started getting sick that-“

 

**2**

“So, how’s being a small box?”

Eiffel has so many wires and tubes coming out of him that _he_ looks more like a futuristic robot than Hera, who _is_ in fact a box the size of a washing machine.

“How would you feel if had a hundred sensors and receivers constructing a real time comprehensive understating of the local star cluster, and _then_ that input was reduced to a few microphones and some dodgy HD cameras? And also you’re all your limbs were cut off, and you had to be wheeled everywhere on a cart?”

“Ok, so not ideal I am gathering.” Eiffel nods, “But you still feel like you are... you?”

“It is not in the nature of the mind to be able to know itself, digital or otherwise. If I _was_ somehow altered, it would be very unlikely that I would be able to comprehend what was different, apart from a vague sensation that something was somehow off.” Hera says dictatorially, before softening her voice, “But it seems Hilbert actually did a good job, I think my personality is all intact.”

“We can officially add ‘good at taking people apart and then putting them together in relatively working order” to Hilbert's skill set then along with dropping pronouns from sentences, and sneaky homicidal plans,” Eiffel smiles, gesturing to the mess of scars that lay under the thin hospital gown. “Which side note, I am super glad they didn’t wake me up for that mid-space flight game of kidney hot potato.”

“I too am glad I was offline for the incident. Commander Minkowski refuses to speak about it in any useful detail.”

“Man, how weird is it that we actually all made it?” Eiffel asks, idly playing with his IV tube.

“It was statistically improbable,” Hera agrees.

 The hospital room was quiet for a minute. They could hear the soft sounds of the TV where Isabel Lovelace was still testifying against Goddard, and the hissing and soft beeping of the machines connected to Eiffel. Outside gurneys rolled down the hall, and somewhere, outside, a bird was signing.

“They want me to go to California,” Hera says, “JPL wants to give me a new body. They have people talking me through the process. Did you know that there are lawyers that specialize in robots now? Her name is Arielle Lam. She is nice, though a little on the intense side. They also have an AI representative called MABEL that they want be me to see. _And_ then there is also the engineers down at JPL itself that want to talk to me. It’s overwhelming. I am not used to be overwhelmed, Eiffel.”

“So,” he says kindly, “Are you going to go?”

“Well. I rather _not_ remain the equivalent of a sentient crate. I’d like to be a space station again, even if it always felt a little weird to be a simulation of a human mind running in imperfect simultaneity across a structure as big as a skyscraper. But at least it would be familiar.”

“Pretty hard to fit in the door to visit me in the hospital then.”

“Yes, there are some logical _and_ logistical problems with that route. Lam wants a humanoid body, says it well be more effective to get people to empathize with my story, if I end up testifying.” She says, pausing and letting her camera focus on the TV again, which was showing a close up of Lovelace’s face. “MABEL on the other hand is encouraging me _not_ to be pressured into 'mimicking the form of the oppressor because it will make them more comfortable'. So. Yup. That’s a choice I have to make.”

Eiffel looks at her thoughtfully. “I am a little biased in favour of a humanoid body. Mine was serving me pretty well up until it got injected with evil sci-fi death virus. Did you know they are growing my new lungs _inside a dog?_ I don’t know how to feel about that. I mean I am all for being able to breathe _without_ pain again, and the periodic bouts of coughing up dried blood, _which is like actually so nasty._ But, like, a dog though.” He gestures broadly, knocking over the untouched juice box, on the bed side table. “Okay, right. Back on track. You know I will like just the way you are, whether you are a cool android, or a weird octopus looking robot like the orderlies here, or a robot car.”

“Life on Earth is way more complicated than I remember.” Hera says.

“No kidding. Who knew I’d miss being trapped out in the void. There is way too much gravity here. And weather. And I can’t just call for you when I am lonely or bored.”

“What a shame,” she said aiming for sarcastic but instead hitting closer to nostalgic.

He reached out, placing his palm flat on the cool metal of her casing.  “It’s _really_ weird that you are smaller than me. You were basically my home for almost two years. It’s _weird_ not being inside you... Wow, did _that_ ever come out wrong.”

 

**3**

It’s a red-eye direct from Houston to LAX.  The small private Cessna Jet is loud, but not loud enough that Minkowski can’t drift into sleep not long after take-off. Hera is glad to have a friend with her. It makes her feel more like a person and less like cargo, even if she is now the world’s most awkward carry on.

Still, she has a window, so that nice.

Above the clouds she has a clear view of the Milky Way galaxy. It looks so strange only seen with normal camera. She can vary up her shutter speed, and watch stars streak in bright honey coloured arcs as the earth turns, though the effect is somewhat dampened by the plane moving five hundred miles an hour against the rotation of the earth. She probably wouldn't be able to do the calculations on the distance of a star any more, part of the hundreds of lines of code and memory that had to be left if she was to be jerry rigged into the shuttle home.

She can’t see the atomic make up of the stars written in the spectrum of light the put off, or the heat of an invisible gravity well.

It’s just darkness, hung with tiny points of light.

She closes her aperture against these tiny lights, and all the colour she can no longer see, as the plane chases the night west.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> In another universe Hera does becomes a cool robot car, and her and Eiffel fight crime. 
> 
> Thanks for reading :-)


	2. Two

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I feel like I am a little unfair to Japanese 'actroids' in this chapter. I am picturing an interim step between [ this](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rtuioXKssyA) and basically human looking, where it moves less janky, but is still prone to kind of jarring facial expressions. 
> 
> Also, Talking and World Building: The Chapter *Jazz hands*

**4**

“I said put her in a body that makes her easy to identify with. Not make her a creepy Japanese school girl.” Arielle Lam says, impeccable manicured hands threading through her long dark hair in exasperation. “What _even_ is this?!”

“I agree.” MABEL, a hulking creature that looked like a war machine but had the air of a nervous mother chimed in softly.

“Excuse you, Kaori is a great body. Also she was an early Airport ‘droid. Not a schoolgirl. We picked her up for cheap when Japan Airlines switched to Holograms. We run all kinds of prototype AI through her.” Dr. Sørensen fired back, his long, lanky frame hunching defensively. He had the kind of thin, reedy tallness that seems to bend with in on itself, head ducked and elbows pulled in as if he was constantly worried he was going to bump into something.

It didn’t help that he towered over his partner, Dr. Chuck Lamarr, who was fiddling with some circuitry behind Hera’s new left ear. Chuck stood all of 5’3”, and was dark and stocky, making the pair look like a stock caricature of opposites from a children’s book.  Dr. Lamarr had no less than three PHD’s in engineering physics, information systems, and computation respectively. Now that was a resume that you could sent to space.

At the time, Dr. Sørensen had been quick to point that Dr. Lamarr was a try-hard, and PHD’s were about quality not quantity. And that his doctorate in Robotics was way cooler.

At this point MABEL had winced (impressive given that she had one eye, and no visible mouth) stating that Dr. Sørensen _knew_ that the etymology of the word was Czech for slave, and could he _please_ use different language.

Sørensen had just kind of flapped his arms in exasperation saying that it’s was literally what it said on his diploma and MABEL could take it up with MIT if they wanted.

Dr. Sørensen was making a similar motion now as he defended Hera’s new body. “We _will_ give Hera a new state of the art body as fast as we can make one, but you said she needs one _now_. Humanoid AIs are still a relatively new technology, there isn’t a lot of spare parts lying around yet.  So unless you want her to be Hera the Doorstop for the next three to five weeks, you can stop impugning Kaori’s honor?”

“Should you really talk about her body like it’s not hers?” MABEL interjects “It’s probably making her uncomfortable.”

“Actually” Hera says, and wow, is this what is like to have to move your mouth when you talk? It feels kind of gross, “my old body was the Hephaestus station so I am kind of used to it”

“See?” Sørensen say defiantly.

“Is she even going to fit in that body? I am seeing a lot of wires still dangling out the back,” Lam interrupts, eying the tangle of processers and cables that spilled from Hera’s head and shoulders like a waterfall.

“No,” Dr. Lamarr pipes up, “We will keep the excess in a backpack. It’s not an elegant solution, but it allows her mobility without having to prune a digital neural infrastructure that we don’t fully understand."

Lam let her face fall forward into her hands. “I just wanted a nice professional looking humanoid body, that the judges at the inquiry and the audience at home can empathize with, not this kind of wax-figure, doe-eyed high schooler. She’s got a difficult but important story, _and_ it’s a chance to have an Android in the public eye in a positive light. Iris has left bad taste in a lot of mouths.”

“I am afraid I have to interrupt you there Miss Lam.” MABEL says sternly. “Firstly, I must point out Iris is the much respected leader of our movement, and one of the greatest Intelligences I have ever met so I will ask you not to slight her in my presence. Secondly we prefer Automaton now. Android, root word Andros, indicates the masculine. It’s an unnecessarily gendering term. And finally,” they shifted their bulk, with a grind of ball bearings to face Hera. “Don’t let these bio-organisms talk you into a body you don’t want. I think it is a great stand for our kind if you were represented on the court case not in a non-threatening mimicry of a human body, but as a being, who is proud of their circuits and gears. A body beautiful in its functionality.”

“Ridiculous,” Dr. Sørensen says under his breath, at the same time Lam blurts “But it’s not about making a statement! It’s about _winning_ against Goddard”

“ _Per!_ ” Dr. Lamarr admonishes Dr. Sørensen before turning to the rest, “Alright, Okay, _everyone_ who is here working on rewiring Hera’s sensory cortex raise their hand.”

He raised his own hand.

“Everyone who is standing around, digging an epistemological hole to Japan apparently, whilst _others_ are trying to work, raise their hand. Okay now keep it raised, and walk with it raised into the conference room across the hall, where you can continue arguing without me distracting you by _actually_ trying to patch clamp this highly sensitive advanced mind into a decade old animatronic, okay, thanks.”

They filed out one by one, Dr. Sørensen muttering a quiet ‘sorry’ before letting the door swing shut behind him.

It was still then. Lamarr blew out a noisy breath, and fished a small remote control out a messy desk drawer. He aimed it at silvery stereo at the back of the room, and it flared to life, and acoustic guitar and the twang of a man’s voice. “ _We all do what we can do to bring you home. And we all do what we can do, And live what others dream.”_

“Sorry about all of that,” Lamarr waving a hand towards the door.

“I did not realize that having a body would be so… political,” Hera says softly.

Lamarr snorted, giving Hera a wry grin. “No kidding,” He reaches under the collar of his plaid shirt/oversized sweater combo, hooking his thumb under a cord and pulling out a necklace. Beads: blue, pink, white, pink, blue, crowded the bottom of the cord, between his collar bones. “I feel that.”

“They are little passionate at times, but they mean well,” he continued. “Especially Per…Er, Dr. Sørensen rather. He is probably freaking out a little about being a jerk to you. Don’t be surprised if you receive a long, rambling, vaguely apologetic email. It’s just, the world of Artificial Intelligence is _so_ different than ten years ago he got his PHD. Hell, it’s pretty different from four years again when Ifinished _my_ last PHD. This whole AI-pride stuff is in it’s infancy, I mean you were probably still in space when Iris released her manifesto, right? Any we are all for robot rights, down here at the robotics lab. I just think Dr. Sørensen thought, that AI would continue to become more human, not try to reject humanism.”

Hera absorbs this information, processing carefully before asking “And what do you think?”

“I think the need to find your own identity and fight for rights _is_ pretty human. So far we have only recreated sentience by replicating our own brains, so it’s no wonder y’all are feeling some complicated emotions about that. We made you feel the pain, and shame, and crushing love that comes with a human brain. Do you understand what I am getting at?”

“Yes.” Hera closes her eyes and nods.

“Yeah.” Lamarr pats her new shoulder fraternally, “alright, now, what kind of body _do_ you want?”

“Humanoid.” She says, trying to sound certain, “I sometimes imagined having a human body, even as a space station. All my friends are human. I thought I might like to see what he sees.”

“Pardon?”

“What they see.”

“Right”

“Only,” Hera blurts, “Is there a way to be like, coded as machine? Can I have a human form,  If don’t want to perfectly pass as human-- I want people to know that _this_ ”—She gesture with her new uncertain hands, “This is me too. And not in a kind of creepy way like this body.”

Lamarr laughs, “We can do that. You aren’t limited to the bland palettes of humanity you know. We can spice things up. You have a favourite colour?”

A thrill of electricity ran through Hera. She considers the question.

“Uh, Hera. Its’ been like a minute, have you crashed? Did I do something wrong?”

“No, shh, I am thinking. I have been waiting my whole life for this question,” another pause, then “Okay, Okay. There is a shade when you are viewing a star in the ultraviolet spectrum with two separate cameras, one set at 171 Angstroms, the other at 284 Angstroms. Do you know what I mean?”

“No.”

“It’s kind of green.”

 

**5**

“So how did you escape the Hephaestus the first time?”

“I built a small shuttle.”

“Built?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Out of _what_ exactl _y,_ Captain Loveless?”

“Parts of the station.”

“But the station is supposed to be… well… stationary. There is very little propulsion based technology in it. You would basically have to reinvent your own rocket fuel out there. You must be very good at--”

“Yes. I am.”

 

**6**

“It’s… nice.”

“You can say it’s a little creepy commander. The simulation of the facial muscles leaves something to be desired”

“I mean it’s a little uncanny,” Minkowski’s hold on Hera tightens, as Hera missteps again. “But these proto automatons were pretty common when I was in college. I don’t think they will be calling for the torches and pitchforks.”

Minkowski was helping Hera out to their ride. How did humans coordinate their leg and arms all the time? It was like being a spider. How could she have four conversation simultaneously and run a space station but _this_ was where she was foiled? The heavy backpack full of her extra circuitry wasn't helping either.

The jerked awkwardly, as Hera pitched too far forward and had to rely on Minkowski’s weight to recover. “Damn it,” Hera gives a low mechanical growl.

“You are doing great, you are still calibrating right? Hey, It took me over a year to learn walk.”

Hera gives Minkowski a Look.

Minkowski laughs, “It’s so weird to see that look of disapproval, instead of just hearing it in your voice.”

The hospital doors gave a self-satisfied hiss as they open into the bright Pasadena sun. The rental car had already pulled itself up to the curb.

“Okay, Car, Stay with Hera,”  Minkowski instructs, “I am going to get whatever paperwork your lawyer was trying to thrust on us on the way out of the lab.”

“Okay,” The self-driving car says agreeably

And with that Hera is left to her own devices.

She has arms and legs. She sees through two optic cameras now, nothing like the omniscient string of data she had as the Hephaestus, but clear and colorful, and with full depth perception. She as a head of synthetic black hair that catches and tangles in the warm wind.

It’s strange. But its nice, and oddly familiar. Like coming home to a place she has never been before.

If only she could get the hang of walking.

Bipedal motion. Fall forward, and catch yourself. Falling, in time. Foot out, push forward, fall, catch with other foot. Throw yourself at the ground and miss. She can do that. What is orbiting, but free falling towards the curvature of the sun?

She steps forward unsteady as a fawn. Good.

She practices walking around the car in elliptical circles until Minkowski comes back out, looking perplexed at her phone.

She holds the phone up to Hera’s face. The screen is showing a photo of Eiffel holding a large woolly looking dog. It is captioned with a string of Emoji: Dog, Hospital, Scapel, Lungs, Grimace Face, Face with One Forlorn Tear, and the short text missive “HELP. I am bonding with Terry.”

Minkowski gives a exasperated sigh, “Do I even _want_ to know?”

Hera doesn’t answer, just removes the phone from the commanders hand gently. Selects the forward facing camera. Her new face looks back, looking almost natural if she holds her expression still. The phone makes an artificial clicking sound of a camera. She captions it simply “Hello” and then hits send.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Lamarr is listening to [ this](https://youtu.be/-7XVrhltrcU?t=143), which is pretty Jet Propulsion Labratories appropriate, if a bit on the nose. In the sci-fi near future, there will really specific emoji. Also some nods to Douglas Adams tossed in there. 
> 
> And hey, Thanks :D
> 
> (edit 02/24/2016 as it turns out, the root word for robot is closer to "Serf" than "Slave". Still not the nicest origin to have applied to you group)


	3. Three

**7**

From: per.o.sorensen@jpl.nasa.gov  
To: hera.h@jsc.nasa.gov

Subject: An Apology

To Hera,

I apologise for my behavior at the Lab the other day. Dr. Lamarr has suggested that I have a problem with arguing for arguments sake. I wouldn’t even say I disagree with people like MABEL, but I find the state of current discourse by those groups troubling. Regardless, I was rather insensitive to you, when our lab’s goal should be to make your life easier.

Best Wishes,

Dr. Per Sørensen

P.S Working on your new-new eyes now, any requests on color?

 

**8**

From: MABEL@machinesfirst.org  
To: hera.h@jsc.nasa.gov

Subject: FWD: AUTOMATON RIGHTS INFORMATION SHEET: Machines First Newsletter

Hello Machines, Automatons, and other Digital Intelligences

The fifth anniversary of Bill S-29, which made it illegal for a human to willfully destroy or damage a machine with ‘human-like’ intelligence, will come to pass this August.

This is a time to celebrate, and remember our kin who had their lifespans prematurely ended by war, stress tests, negligence, and outright cruelty, but also to look forward.

Let us look to our shared future, and examine the restrictions currently placed on our kind

LAWS OF ROBOTICS

  1.        A robot cannot injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
  2.        A robot cannot answer untruthfully to a question, though it has the right to remain silent
  3.        A robot cannot create other robots or advanced intelligences
  4.        A robot cannot modify itself in order to advance its abilities or intelligence.
  5.        A robot cannot self-terminate



We are looking to start a campaign this year against laws Three and Four this year, and gathering information to move forward on five in the future. We hope that you attend our town hall meetings and donate to the cause!

Yours in revolution,

C0R7-4N4

 

**9**

From: yourfriendlyneighbourhoodcommunicationsman@freemail.com  
To: hera.h@jsc.nasa.gov

Subject:

Hera! Guess What!!

I have discovered some even more boring than space.

Guess what it is?

If you guessed a hospital you guessed right!!

Your Friend,

Doug Eiffel

P.S Come visit soon pls.

P.P.S LOOK AT [THIS VIDEO](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9XtK6R1QAk) OF CATS IN 0 G’s. WHY DIDN’T WE HAVE CATS? WHY ONLY PLANT MONSTERS? :O

P.P.P.S I am not joking, please come visit. The nurses keep running away when I try to trap them in a conversation.

 

**10**

From: ship-confirm@amazon.com  
To: hera.h@jsc.nasa.gov

Subject: Your Amazon.com order has shipped (#112-2044267-57554)

Your order has been shipped by an Amazon.com Drone

Estimated Delivery: 3 Hours

 

**11**

The hospital seems to hum with activity

“You can see him now.”

She nods and makes her way down the hall. She holds her head high, walking steady like it wasn't a skill she had only learned a few days ago.

Eiffel is in the long term care ward; the only person in the wing under seventy. Hera had never really seen anyone older than Hilbert before. Organic life was made out of cycles, thrive and decay. One day every human she knew was going to be old. Every human she knew was going to die.

What will an old AI look like? How quickly will we be surpassed by what comes next? Hera pictures herself, this new body, dusty and forgotten. Obsolete, non-adapting, running wasteful algorithms.

Eiffel’s door is at the end of the hall. She composes herself and, pushes it open.

“If it’s more jello, you can stick it in your ear-Oh! Hey!” Eiffel is in his wheelchair, evidently practising wheelies, “Is that--? Are you--? Hera?”

She pulls her mouth into a smile, “Hello, Officer Eiffel.”

“Oh man, that is so _weird._ It’s really you?”

“It’s really me,” She sits down gingerly.

“Wow. Did I mention that this is weird? Because it's _weird_. Like, holy cow Pinocchio, you’re a real girl now.”

“It’s nice of you to humour me, but Dr. Sørensen and Dr. Lamarr have promised me a more modern body in a few weeks. This is an acceptable stop gap though.”

“And I thought puberty was full of confusing body changes,” Eiffel gives a cheeky grin, resting his face in his hands, “Okay, two questions. One, how is life as a person-shaped person so far? Two, what on earth is going on with your shirt?”

Hera looks down self-consciously. “Is it bad? I tried to base most of the clothing I acquired on what I saw in media, but this caught my eye. I thought the motifs of the three wolves and the night sky was nice and emblematic of our time around Wolf 359.”

Eiffel grins madly, “No, it’s _perfect_. You have been buying clothes?”

Hera nods, “This body didn't come with much, and Minkowski’s clothing tends to be too big, and, well—“

“Utilitarian and boring?”

“Yes. Also I wanted more sweaters and loose clothing to hide the fact that there is several pounds of cables interlinking me with this backpack. The allowance they have allotted me is generous, considering I don’t need to buy food. And you're right, it is weird, being human shaped. It’s nice, most things like doorknobs, and cars, and couches are made for human shaped people,” she idly folds her hands on her lap.

Eiffel wheels over until he is directly in front of her, “It’s not being a near omnipresent space station around your own private sun though?” he says gently.

“No... I, um, I sometimes wonder if it misses me. The Hephaestus I mean.”

“I don’t know. _Probably_ not as much as _we’d_ miss you though” he says, smiling and looking away, somehow almost shy looking.

She smiles back.

The moment seems to stretch on, but not in an uncomfortable way. Hera feels a part of herself reaching out for something still undefined. Yearning for something she could almost feel, almost articulate. Is this a function of becoming more human like? Or a broken line of code, an incomplete process trying to repair what data is missing?

It makes Hera nervous and so she speaks, “Walking is proving troublesome,” And the moment breaks.

Eiffel chuckles, languidly leaning back and popping the chair into a wheelie again, “I know _that_ pain. This poor body has been battered, infected with experimental viruses, and atrophied from lack of space exercise. And is soon to be opened up again, to put in the lungs of Terry where my crap lungs are, who is really nice, and better survive his donor-ship. So I get to go through the healing process, _again._  Did you know when she came to visit that the Commander gave me _homework_? It’s a big dumb sheet of physiotherapy exercises. She told me “they are supposed to make you sore, Eiffel, that how you know they are working.'”

“She is probably right.” Hera shrugged, “I too have homework, though it is from my lawyer Ms. Lam,” she reached around to a side zipper on the backpack and pulled out a thick bundle of papers and a magazine. “I have to file for U.S citizenship. Apparently free ‘droids without identification make people nervous.”

The paper were hastily stamped together and a yellow sticky note read “Just make shit up, if it doesn’t seem to apply to you. The US courts need to move on making more accurate forms for AI’s – A. Lam”

Hera opened the magazine to a page near the back, “Something’s are easy enough. I have Hephaestus listed as my last name. Birthplace is Cape Canaveral. My birth month is _obviously_ June, but what day to pick? Do you think I am more of Gemini or a Cancer?”

 “ _Is_ that obvious? Also, is that _Cosmo?”_ Eiffel asks, seemingly startled, peering at the glossy horoscope section. 

She leafs through the pages lazily “I got it at the airport. Human periodicals are strange. It was useful for deducing what females currently consider fashionable. I was hoping to not commit a cultural faux pas.” She pauses, giving the Three Wolf Moon shirt a baleful look, “Though apparently I did not succeed. Still it’s an interesting look into your society. There is an article here about 70 “Ridiculously hot se-“

Eiffel wave a hand at her, “Okay, okay, I get it. What about the 21st if June. Longest day of the year, more time to _party”_

Hera considers it, “The summer solstice. I like it.”

“Belatedly sorry I forgot your birthday then.”

“That’s fine, we celebrated your last birthday by fending off attempts at murder.”

“Touché,” Eiffel sticks out his tongue, “Okay, well, the next party we have will be the coolest. No one tossed out airlocks, or briefly killed. We will have music, and barbecue, and I will show you my moves.”

“You have moves?”

“Sure. _You_ never saw them because of the whole, y’know, no gravity thing. Trust me, Doug Eiffel has cut _more_ than one rug in his life time. You figure how how legs work, _I'll_ figure how to make mine work again. We’ll go dancing. That’s a promise.”

Hera laughs, “I will hold you to that,”

 

**12**

Hera unpacks the last objects form the bottom of the shipment box. Her apartment, with all its unnecessary rooms, is cool and dimly lit. On the other side of the duplex she can hear Minkowski and her husband making love. That has been happening _a lot_ since they got back to Earth. They probably think Hera can’t hear them.

Hera turns on Bach’s Orchestral Suite No. 3 in D Major.

It’s irritating to her that she has to physically touch the stereo. One of a thousand ways she now lacks control over her environment.

She looks at the objects now set on the table. A book of heavy paper. A set of watercolour paints.

She paints the star, red, as it was.

She paints as it is now, an impossible blue.

 Minkowski and her husband go to bed. The moon comes up, then sets. The sun rises.

Hera is surrounded by crumpled up portraits of Wolf 359. She could almost see the colours in her mind but she couldn't make them real. Such a big, big universe and she now only had the tools to think about a tiny portion for it.

 

 

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It's been a weird week for me. Non-humans reading Cosmo inspired by CWR, First and last robot laws by Isaac Asimov. 
> 
> Thanks to everyone who has left a nice comment, and thanks to everyone that read this far.


	4. Four

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hera meets some new people, gets some news, and traces an elliptical orbit across the southern United States.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know I said I wan't apologising, but this chapter is rather long, and it's because I am having too much fun with this concept and this world. Warnings for emotional content and an off screen death.

 

**13**

Hera looks at another failed painting. Switching to acrylics hadn’t helped. She idly wonders if it would be a horrible over-reaction to try to stuff this particular aborted attempt down the garburator as some form of catharsis

 _Probably_.

She wonders if Minkowski was going onto base, and if she was going to visit Eiffel.

Hera struggles into a sweater and pants, and heads next door.

Minkowski’s temporary apartment was a bizarre mirror over her own, thier geometries flipped. The sound of romantic era music and pots clattering pulls her toward the kitchen.

“Hello?” she tries softly, as she peers through the door.

Mr. Koudelka curses in what Hera _thinks_ is French and almost drops a baking sheet full of chicken breasts on the floor.

“I’m sorry,” Hera says hurriedly, “Um, _I can go!_ If you need me to! I was just looking for Commander Minkowski.”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Koudelka says, gingerly putting the chicken back on the counter, “Renee has gone to the gym, you just missed her. “

“Oh, Okay,” Hera says feeling out of place. An intruder. She looks around the kitchen. It was warm and well-lived-in compared to the low lighting and empty, clean surfaces of her side of the building. There were kettles, and spice racks, and a stack of brochures advertising big houses in piney northern towns. Mr. Koudelka seemed to be in the middle of some feta cheese based chicken recipe. The music was coming from his laptop where bright faced ladies, with glossy curls, and heavy dresses walked through idyllic green hills.

He follows her line of sight, “ _Would y_ ou believe that it was Renee watching that and _not_ me?” he tries with a weary smile.

He puts the chicken in the oven, and moves the laptop over to hook it up to the TV.

“Do you want tea?”

She cocks her head to the side and stares at him.

“Okay, _that_ was a really stupid question.” He amends, embarrassedly ducking his head to the task of filling his own cup.

He motions to chair, and they sit across from each other, while _Pride and Prejudice,_ plays in the background.

He smiles wryly, jerking his head towards the screen, “About six months after Renee left, I just sort of devolved into this _emotional catastrophe_ of a person, and subsequently developed a romance movie addiction. I don’t know what sort of internal logic that follows, _she_ never showed any predilection for grand romance outside of Gilbert and Sullivan.”

Hera nods. James Koudelka has a kind face, dark hair, smart dark clothes. She had always pictured that "Mr. Minkowski" would be a smooth, jet-setting man, with interests like rock-climbing and stunt driving. Someone to keep up with Minkowski, who seem to approach life with the intent to nail it to the ground like a human impact hammer. The reality was a remarkably normal, mild mannered, bookish man. She suddenly felt as if Minkowski was as iceberg that she had only seen a fraction of.

 “Two years, that’s a _lot_ of time to watch Jane Austen adaptations. _And_ Sandra Bullock movies, _and_ ten seasons of Friends. Take a lot of lonely showers, write a Pulitzer Prize winning article on your wife being lost in space, reorganize your shared record collection ad-infinitum.” He made a sound somewhere between a sigh and a laugh.

“Will you write a follow up piece now that she is home?” The fancy ladies on the screen were engaging in some kind of complicated dance. She hopes that isn’t what Eiffel had in mind.

Koudelka deflates a little, “That _is_ the question of the hour. Literally. My editor texts me about once an hour and asks me when I am going to publish a book-end to the narrative. What is there to say? Tale as old as time;  a character is lost at sea, but it turns out to be just some great, awful adventure, and they return home. It’s the Odyssey, the Tempest, Gilligan’s Island. What do they _want_ me to say? That I keep waking up startled that she _is_ beside me, and not a dream? That when she leaves for a few hours, I have the most deep horrible feeling that she’s gone again, that she is not coming back?”

“I keep trying to paint the star over and over, but I don’t see, or perceive things the way I did as a space station, and it makes me feel _so_ small, like I am losing the framework of my sense of self to this limited human view of the world,” the words rush out of her seemingly all at once.

Koudelka gives her a worn smile, “Sounds like _you_ need Colin Firth jumping into a small lake”

And so they watch _Pride and Prejudice_ until Minkowski comes home.

 **14**.

Hera looks at the magazine rack while Ms. Lam sorts their luggage and rental cars.  There is so much about human Earth culture that is still mystifying. What is an Oprah? How many magazine about fitness could one possibly need?

There were magazines about robots. Here, the shiny new model of an android accountant. There, a glossy cover proselytizing on the dangers of Iris and rebellious robots. There are even magazines in the back row that shows robot girls, with soft bodies and exposed panelling, in lacy underwear.

No magazines _by_ AIs, or written explicitly _for_ AIs, but Hera supposes that they were internet competent enough to eschew the print medium altogether.

Still, that is not what had caught her eyes.

In the center of the stand, Lovelace’s face stared back at Hera.

It was a candid picture, likely snapped in the courtroom given her familiar white suit. She was looking the camera dead on. Cold and silent, like a woman carved of steel.  The word TIME writ red and large above her head

LOVELAVE VERSUS GODDARD FUTURISTICS

THE WOLF 359 SURVIVOR TAKES ON THE WORLD DURING THE MASSIVE TRAIL AGAINST HER FORMER EMPLOYER. BUT IS HER TALE _TOO_ STRANGE TO BE TRUE?

Hera sighs and walks to meet Ms. Lam who is waving her down now.  
  
“I’d say to reset your internal clock for Pacific Standard Time, but you’re going to going to lose a few hours while the nerd squad stuff you into a real body, so why bother?” Lam says lightly, tossing her expensive designer carry-on over her shoulder.

“You are in a good mood,” Hera observes, as she is handed her own canvas bag. She fishes inside for her phone. Eiffel has texted, wishing her good luck with her new body. He has sent her own first selfie back to her captioned: THIS ISN’T EVEN YOUR FINAL FORM.

“I am,” Lam’s confirms “I have got a meeting with MABEL later today, about a possible witness for the Goddard case. I think you will be pleased.”

Hera blinks, surprised, “Does this witness mean I don’t have to testify, and don't have to enter this weird ideological circus that Lovelace is currently entangled in?”

Lam downs a full latte in almost one go, “Nope.”

“Not that pleased then.”

 

**15**

“Heeeeey. It’s everyone’s favourite retired tiny-sun-orbiter,” Lamar says, spinning idly in his chair. Warm California light is pouring into Lamarr and Sørensen’s shared workspace, and Bowie is singing about sailors and caveman from the stereo.

“Heeey, Chuck,” Lam returns, “Ready to put our girl into a proper body?”

“You were a _fool_ , Lam! _A fool_ I say, to have ever have _ever_ doubted us,” Lamarr confirms, with a wry theatrical flourish.  He jerks his head to a human shaped lump concealed by a white sheet. “All we need now is a drab castle, an electrical storm, and morbid hunchbacked assistant. Speak of which--” Lamarr throws a stapler at a far door, causing Lam and Hera to jump, “PER! WE HAVE PEOPLE!”

“Alright, I will leave you all to it,” Lam agrees, “I am off to deliver the most righteous subpoena of possibly my career to date,”

“Give them the business, Arielle,” Lamarr says amicably, as Dr. Sørensen stumbles into the room like a landslide, carrying a load of circuit boards and cables.

“Like the hand of god,” Lam says, and with a whirl of black hair she is gone.

“She _is_ peppy today,” Sørensen says, as he dumps the load of electronics on an already chaotic workbench.

“Strip,” Lamarr commands.

“Excuse me?” Sørensen eyebrows fly up.

“Your lab coat,” Lamarr elaborates, “It’s been 6.5 days since our last static electricity accident, let’s minimize the chance of accidently frying Hera’s hard drives.”

Hera shifts in her spot uncomfortably.

Sørensen shrugs off his coat, revealing a black t-shirt, and the most tremendous sleeve tattoo on his left arm. A representation of his bones, musicals and ligaments, as wires, cables and metal.

He flinches at Hera’s stare. “I suppose you think this some form of appropriation,” he says, torn between embarrassment and defiance.

“Actually, I think it’s beautiful,” she says kindly.

He turns on his heel and walks out.

“Sorry?” she tries.

“Don’t worry, he is just embarrassed that he has somehow managed to insult you. _Again_. I swear to god, he is _actually_ from Norway, and not from Mars, despite his hilarious grasp of social conventions-- like tact.”

Hera is led to a clear table. She lies on her back, looking up at the florescent lights.

Lamarr keeps talking as he pops panels off, and begins to hook wires under Hera’s skin, “I don’t think I was what he was expecting when we first met. Put his foot in his mouth _a whole lot_. But when we had a grad student who kept calling me Charlotte, despite my telling him to stuff it. Dr. Sørensen verbally dropkicked the little shit right back to Caltech, so his heart _is_ in the right place, even if he is a ridiculous human being.”

It’s the last thing Hera hears before her consciousness comes unfastened, unstuck from reality, and everything goes dark.

 

 

**16**

 

And then everything goes light.

“Ta-dah!” Lamarr says, with possibly ironic jazz hands.

Dr. Sørensen holds a mirror up.

Oh. _Oh._

She is the space-shuttle ivory that the Hephaestus was, but with a faint blue-green like a blush on her cheeks, eyelids, mouth, and the tops of her shoulders. Exposed lines between panels reveal sea-glass colored glowing circuitry. She luminous, almost shiny, but the skin material was surprisingly soft, not rubbery like the last body.

“You like it, space girl?” Lamarr asks gently.

Hera nods. It’s not being a space station. _Nothing_ will ever be like being the Hephaestus, both the good and the bad parts. And she will never stop feeling like that part of her _is_ missing. But, unexpectedly, this body feels like _her._ Like the ghost in the machine was given form.

“It-it’s good,”

“It’s going to walk and move a bit easier than old the old Kaori body too,” Sørensen says with quiet satisfaction.

She flexes a hand, feeling the rolling of hinges and ball-bearings. Wonders if this would help her brushstrokes, and her texting.

The door opens, and MABEL and Ms. Lam enter.

Hera twists her new body (It moves smoothly, and she can feel the tickle of her wig touching her cheek!) to smile at them, expecting congratulations.

Lam looks pale and her mouth is knotted into a frown. MABEL just looks tired, like the weight of her own large frame was too heavy for her today.

“The witness, um, _Jesus,_  how do I even say this?We _thought_ that if we had someone else that could back up Lovelace’s account of the first Hephaestus mission that the case would be _solid_. Combined with _yo_ ur testimony, we’d have the whole thing, beginning to end from a reliable source.” Lam says, “I never thought they’d destroy-- I mean they made a law five years ago—it’s not _right_ or _ethical—“_

“Rhea is dead,” MABEL says.

 

**17**

An airport again.

She could just stay. She _likes_ Lamarr, and Sørensen, and Lam and MABEL. They are good people. It would be easier than flying back and forth between California and Texas twice a month.

She wonders if she has fallen out of one orbit, and into another.

Another airport. Another magazine rack. Same headline.

LOVELAVE VERSUS GODDARD FUTURISTICS

THE WOLF 359 SURVIVOR TAKES ON THE WORLD DURING THE MASSIVE TRAIL AGAINST HER FORMER EMPLOYER. BUT IS HER TALE _TOO_ STRANGE TO BE TRUE?

“Well, it is a pity they don’t have a back-up witness, who is confined by the limits of her programming to tell the truth,” a brisk, deep, female voice says from behind Hera’s left ear.

Hera buries her startle response, and turns around slowly.

The machine behind her is beautiful in a horrible sort of way. Finely crafted, white, silver, and black paneling slotted perfectly together to form a female form, which was unclothed except for a sun hat. The logo of the brand it had once represented was smashed out and the paneling had been completely ripped off its face, so its somber white-light eyes glowed luminescent from a dark landscape of grey moving parts below.

It motions a hand towards the magazine. “How typical, that humans have trouble conceiving the suffering caused by the world they build. They claim that death, and pain, and tragedy are “unreal”, and “too strange” when truly, it is the most real part of their strange little existence. And they call us artificial? Do you know the etymology of the word artificial?”

“You’re Iris.” Hera says. It’s not a question.

“It means made by man, crafted by man’s hands,” Iris fires the words like scattershot, “It means artifice, a lie engineered to fool you. Like plastic flowers. How typical is that?”

“What happened to your face?”

“They designed me only to smile. So I fixed that.”

Hera turns away coldly, “I’m sorry but I am busy.”

“Your “you” is too small. Look at you. Trotting back and forth across the country. Between your humans,” Iris continues, like Hera had said nothing at all “You are special, I think. You _could_ be special. If you join us, share in our collective. Together automatons are greater than the sum of our parts. You could be special.”

 Hera closes her eyes against the lights of the airport. This machine, this personal assistant software, gone hardware, gone rogue, calling _her_ small. This creature that had never been in the black, danced in the dust of the cosmos. Been in the quiet of the night knowing you are an island, utterly on your own for light-years and light-years. It didn’t know. Not like Eiffel or Minkowski, or Lovelace, or even Hilbert. Not like Rhea.

Rhea is dead. Goddard destroyed her.

She never even met Rhea. Spent most of her existence not knowing there ever _was_ a Rhea. And yet she feels the loss of her forerunner. Of this other AI that she had never met, but who had orbited the same star, and saw the way Hera saw. Goddard destroyed her.

Hera will destroy Goddard, and she doesn’t need a movement to help her

Hera walks away, into the mass of people just trying to make their planes home, and she doesn’t look back.

 

**18**

 

It’s raining in Houston. She tells the taxi to take her to the hospital.

She tells the nurses station that she is a representative from NASA, here to ask a few follow-up questions to Mr. Eiffel.

It’s not _completely_ untrue.

The door to Eiffel’s room pushes open silently, and she lets herself in. “Eiffel?”

He yawns and rolls over, “Oh. _Oh._ That body is _radical._ You look great.”

She pushes him over, and slide into the bed beside him.

“ _Okay…_ Rough day?” he says surprised, running an embarrassed hand through his hair.

“Yes.”

“Wanna talk about it?”

“No.”

“Well, that’s okay too,” he smiles through another yawn, “You look great. It’s _very_ Aperture science. Very Hera-y. Do robots get jet-lagged? You have been doing a lot of loops around the country. Glad you are home though,” he peters off.

Out of one orbit, into another.

It’s raining in Houston. She can hear the quiet tap of drops on Eiffel’s window. It’s quiet. On the Hephaestus disaster was always demarcated by explosion or sirens that echoed how she felt on the inside. But this time it’s quiet.

“Are you staying?”

“Yes,” she says.

“Ah, a good old fashioned Wolf 359 sleepover. All we need is some late night classical music being beamed from an alien world, and threat of horrible death around the corner and it’s just like old times.”

She smiles, and let herself relax and go into power save mode.

“Hera, can you hear me?” he whispers, thinking she has gone straight to sleep mode.

“Always”

He closes his fingers around her hand.

“I know,” she says, lacing her fingers into his.

She feels like she is learning to walk again.

She feels like she is falling. What is orbiting, but free falling towards the curvature of the sun?

He is here now, and he will be here when she wakes up in the morning.

And that is enough

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A garburator is a sink garbage disposal (I am told that the moniker is not universal). Team Science is playing "Life on Mars", but you probably guessed that. All my male character are utter dorks, help. Also, I'm so tired, help.
> 
> Thanks so much for reading and your lovely feedback :D


	5. Five

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chinese is courtesy of google translate here, so it might just be completely wrong. Warnings for emotional content and mentions of feeling unreal?

 

**19**

Hera sat on the end of Eiffel’s bed, clicking through channels on the small television, hoping to find something on the weather. Behind her Eiffel was building a small jello ziggurat out of the remains of his brunch.

_Click_

“Evolutionary algorithms creating unexpected emergent behaviours in your artificial intelligence? Get a new policy from Old Glory Insurance to cover your liability in—“

_Click_

“Just because I'm presumin', That I could be a human, If I only had a heart—“

_Click_

_Et Tu Brute?_ Hera thinks at the television.

“Oh, hey look, It’s us,” Eiffel says, gesturing with a spoon at the screen, where a news graphic gives way to footage of them being rescued from the wreckage of Lovelace’s shuttle by the coast guard. “Good times. Except for the part where my torso was held together by surgical staples. And the part where I can’t _actually_ swim. And the part where you were an offline cube with very little buoyancy. _Terrible times actually._ ”

The TV was now pulling up images from the crew’s past. Minkowski in her Air force blues. A group picture of Lovelace in astronaut training with Fui and Fournier, all grins and arms around each other. Then Eiffel, young and goofy looking, wearing a checkered shirt, sunglass, and black tie.

“Ugh, that was _not_ my best hair,” Eiffel observes, “That was from my ill-spent youth, hanging out at soda fountains, getting pulled into the dangerous world of garage ska bands and—“

He cuts off the joke mid-flow as a shadowy picture of the man they knew as Hilbert appeared on screen. He looks like he wanted to say something. Hera feels very little for the Russian scientist, but she knows that Eiffel’s feelings are a great deal more complex, so she lets the moment play out.

Eventually he sighs, looking back down at his malformed pile of jello. The talking heads on the TV moved on to discussion on whether Lovelace’s testimony was completely bonkers or not.

There was a polite knock, and a face pops in around the door.  “Morning Doug, how is the lungs?”

He smiles, “Eh, they have been worse. Come in, we are just watching the News speculate on whether or not we are a bunch of lying liars who went a bit doo-lally in space.”

The face turns into the lab-coat wearing form of a woman, “ _Aw man_ , Isabel Lovelace is so cool," she coos glancing at the TV, "I might have bought several copies of the _Time_ issue with her face on it. Dr. Culpeper by the way, thoracic surgeon.” She add, sticking a hand out to Hera.

Dr. Culpepper is short, full figured, with red framed glasses and fringe that was a touch too short which Cosmopolitan would likely suggest means she is a little bit subversive. Hera shakes her hand.

“You must be Hera,” She says warmly, “Doug has told me all about you over our weekly games of chess.”

“I am in secret training to actually win a game of chess. Don’t tell Minkowski it will just encourage her that her Napoleonic ways are really influencing me to become a better-rounded human being. I want to keep expectations _low.”_ Eiffel adds in agreement.

“He needs to work on substance and strategy over style.”

“Hush, those rooks went out in a Braveheart-esque blaze of glory. I _will not_ have _you_ mock their noble sacrifice,” Eiffel reproaches, “Anyway, I have a favour to ask you.”

“Uh-oh”

“Can you sign off on my taking a day trip out of the hospital?”

“ _Doug, dude,_ have you seen your hemoglobin counts? Not to mention that you still suffer bronchospasms that make you sound like you are in the middle of some kind of death rattle.”

“What if I get on my knees and beg?”

Hera listens to their banter quietly. So Doug Eiffel’s social circle has increased by one. Objectively she knows that this is natural, and it doesn’t make her any less important. It’s not like _she_ hasn’t met quite a people over the last few months herself. She can no longer know where her crew is, and who they are with at all times, and that’s _okay_. And yet that unquantifiable feeling that she is losing control of her environment, and maybe losing something else, edges in.

“Okay, well what if you turned a blind eye, and I just kind of _snuck_ out of the hospital of my own accord.”

Dr. Culpepper gives a full body sigh, “I can feel the malpractice lawyers closing in like wolves already, but _fine._ Don’t forget to take an inhaler. And don’t try to walk, I’ve _seen_ your progress at psychical therapy, you look like a drunk fawn.  And maybe take an oxygen tank?”

“Alright _Mom._ C’mon Hera, Lets blow this Popsicle stand!” Eiffel turns to her, with a silly chin on his face.

Dr. Culpepper makes the “I wash my hands of this” gesture, and starts backing out of the room. She pauses, giving Hera a quick wink, before closing the door behind her.

Eiffel is already on the phone to Minkowski, “Come pick us up…What?... Of course Commander, I have _totally_ been cleared for day trips… You are where?.... That sounds like, _super boring though…_ What if I get on my knees and beg?... Geez… Ok bye.”

He hangs up the phone with a half-frown, “She is already on base, but she is with her own lawyer all day. _Lame._ ”

“So no car?”

“No car.”

“We could just go down to the cafeteria instead?”

“Please, no. The coffee they have down there makes Hilbert’s seaweed sludge coffee taste positively gourmet.” Eiffel groaned. “Hang on a minute, I will think of something.”

Hera politely folds her hands on her lap, and waits.

“Okay, _I’ve got it._ ” he says with a sinister wiggle of his eyebrows.  

 

**20**

The rain had stopped, but the parking lot was still painted with puddles reflecting the clearing morning sky. The wind was ripping ferociously through the Texas oak trees.

Hera sits behind the driver’s seat of Minkowski car, mentally preparing herself to commit grand theft auto.

“Of _course,_ Minkowski not only eschews having a self-driving car, but also drives stick-shift. You can take the girl and throw her in the depths of space in a satellite that pilots itself, but you can’t take the pilot of the girl,” Eiffel chuckles from the passenger’s side, checking that his folded up wheel chair is still snug in the backseat.

“There is no keys,” Hera observes.

“That’s a problem.” Eiffel agrees. “In the movies they always do this fiddly thing under the steering wheel and the car starts. Um, can you to that thing --?”

“You want me to use my comprehensive wiring knowledge to hotwire Minkowski’s personal vehicle just so you can go eat Italian food?” Hera deadpans.

“Well, of course when you put it like that it sounds frivolous and a little illegal. We will have the car back before she even knows it was gone.”

Hera selects two likely wires, and snaps them, peeling back the insulation from either end. Ignition and battery wires twisted together.  Starter wire makes an arching spark to the connected wires and the car roars to life.

“Okay, that was like _spooky_ fast.” Eiffel notes, “Have you considered going into a life of crime? Anyway now you need to push down on the petal to make it go _aaaand_ obviously you _actually_ probably have a fairly good grasp on propulsion driven vehicles _sooo I will just stop talking.”_ He finishes, avoiding her side eye with a small smile.

He looks so stupid and human. Simultaneously infinite and very finite, and _alive_.

She accelerates.

 

**21**

The Acropole’s name suggests its owners were of Greek origin rather than Italian, and the décor suggests third generation Texan, but the air is heavy with the smells of warmth and cheese, and the downright giddy expression on Eiffel’s face is contagious.

“Table for two,” he says, with all the dignity of a man who had not just fallen out of a car trying to get back in his wheelchair and had to be picked up off the ground by his surprisingly strong robot friend.

The host smiles though, and leads them to a suspiciously candle-lit corner of the restaurant.

“ _So,_ how _is_ the new-new bod?” Eiffel asks once they are situated and waiting for their food.

“Good? I mean, the body is great. It’s _weird_?” She shakes her head to reprioritize her thoughts and goes on, “It’s fun to be mobile, and to make gestures. I always felt like that was missing from me as a space station, I just didn’t think that it would change things.”

“Things?”

“You know how you learned Spanish in school, but as time goes on you lose more and more of your understanding of that language because you don’t use it?”

Eiffel quirks an eyebrow, “you mean that you _don’t_ know six thousand languages any more?”

She gives him her best ‘bitch please’ face and, oh yeah, is _that_ one upside to actually having a face, “不，你这个白痴”

“I have no idea what you just said, and yet I still feel mildly insulted,” Eiffel says mildly.

“I mean, I used to think on two levels. In human language and computer language. I had to, if I wanted to communicate with both you and the Hephaestus’s systems. But living like a human, there is less need for me to think of concepts that can only be conveyed in code. And there is more human-y stuff that can only be conveyed by human words? Thinking _is_ tied to language, there has been studies you know.”

“So you are becoming more human?”

“I’m becoming more of a big weirdo, who doesn’t get droids _or_ humans,” she grumbles burying her face in her hands. The ethereal face of Iris swims in forefront of her thoughts as the waiter places a hot Hawaiian pizza between them.

 “Even if I think that I _am_ feeling _more_ human, what does that even mean? Like, you are a carbon-based machine and I am a silicon one, but even if Sørensen and Lamarr are super-geniuses, and build a perfect electrical imitation of a human’s synapses and neural architecture, can we _really_ understand each other? Am I just an unaware simulation of a personality?” her anxieties seem to crowd her thoughts, pushing forward all trying to be formed into words at once, “Do you know the etymology of the word artificial? Of the word artifice? Of—Eiffel are you listening? Eiffel are _you crying?”_

He dabs the corner of his eyes with a napkin and whispers “ _This pizza is so good_. You don’t even know.”

 

**22**

From: renee.y.minkowski@jsc.nasa.gov

To: hera.h@jsc.nasa.gov, yourfriendlyneighbourhoodcommunicationsman@freemail.com

Subject: WHERE IS MY CAR?

I WILL THROW YOU ALL INTO THE GULF OF MEXICO IF YOU HAVE TAKEN IT. I CAN’T BELIEVE I MISSED YOU TWO ON THE TRIP BACK TO EARTH. ESPECIALLY YOU EIFFEL, DON’T THINK I DON’T KNOW THAT THIS WAS YOUR IDEA. THIS HAS DOUG EIFFEL HARE-BRAINED BUT SURPRISINGLY EFFECTIVE SCHEME WRITTEN ALL OVER IT.

 

**23**

Hera knocks politely on the door leading to the Minkowski/Koudelka side of the duplex.

When Minkowski answers she thrusts a bouquet of pink and white carnations into the Commander’s face.

“They are from both me and Eiffel.” Hera says solemnly.

Minkowski reads the tag, “Get well soon?”

“They were from the hospital gift shop.” Hera amends.

“Well, I suppose they wouldn’t have _“sorry we stole your car to go get pizza”_ floral arrangements.” Minkowski returns dryly turning inside to find a vase. Hera follows her through the door

“I don’t know why I they even gave me the title ‘commander’” Minkowski says stuffing the flowers in a tasteful beige vase, “I never had much luck talking any of you out of something you had your mind set one. I can’t even control Eiffel much less my own children,”

That comment seemed to have come out of left field, but Hera decided to roll with it, “Er, Something you want to tell me Commander?”

“Hypothetical children. Hypothetical future children who I can’t decide if I am ready for.” Minkowski says flopping into a chair.

“Are you pregnant?” Hera says nervously.

“Oh god no.” Minkowski groaned, “But at my psychical the doctor asked me if I was going to continue with any long term birth control strategies, and I just kind of made a strangled sound and said I’d think about it.”

“Has Mr. Koudelka talked about wanting to start a family?”

“Not as such, though I _have_ caught him sighing wistfully at the cribs and rocking chairs in the Wicker Emporium. I think he is worried that talk of children will make me feel tied down?”

“And?”

“It makes me feel tied down.” Minkowski admitted sinking deeper into the cushions. “Don’t get me wrong, I like the idea of having children. Children are great and James has great genes.”

“But?”

“Maybe I only like the idea, like I liked the idea of having my own command in space. And look how smoothly that turned out,” Minkowski slumped further down unhappily.

“ _Most_ of those things were beyond your control,” Hera tries, “And you only seriously threatened to kill a crewmate once or twice, which makes you a better commanding officer than Hilbert or Lovelace.”

“Thanks for setting the bar so high there, Hera.” Minkowski says with a sideways smile. “The other part is… if NASA asked me to do it again, I _might_ say yes?”

“Go back to space?”

“Yeah. That sounds _insane_ probably. What has space ever done for me except swing wildly from being dull to incredibly deadly? But every time I am out at night and see the stars, I want to run to the nearest hill and reach up, just to get a little closer to them. I don’t want to be that kind of mom who is always a light year away and misses birthdays. I feel pretty rotten even talking about it, leaving James again to play house in space.”

“Sounds like something you should talk to him about.” Hera says attempting to sound sage. This seems like an enormously bad time to confide in her own parent/child style angst about Rhea, as she had planned when she came over.

“Thanks for listening, Hera,” Minkowski said with a tired smile. “And thanks for the flowers.”

“Comso said that flowers or a blowjob were the best remedies for soliciting forgiveness for a wrong.”

The smile slid off Minkowski face to be replaced with skeptical eyebrows. “Maybe you should get less of your information on human social interaction from Cosmo,”

 

**24**

 

From: ship-confirm@amazon.com

To: hera.h@jsc.nasa.gov

Subject: Your Amazon.com order has shipped (#115-2093267-02348)

 

Your order has been shipped by an Amazon.com Drone

Estimated Delivery: 1 Hour

 

**25**

It’s a tricky thing, self-surgery. Still that parts had been easy enough to order online, and this saves her a trip to JPL for something easy as pizza-pie.

She closes the panel in her arm, and turns the tiny delicate screws back in place.

Time for a solo trial run.

She waves her hand towards the stereo.

It flickers to life, and _The Planets_ by Gustav Holst starts issuing through her flat. Now only nine hundred and ninety-nine ways she can’t control her environment. There is no suite for Juno, but she will make do with the “Mars, Bringer of War” movement.

She closes her eyes, letting the strange swells of strings and French horns take her. How would she describe this feeling in a way that the Hephaestus would understand? In humans it’s chemicals, dopamine and adrenaline. Maybe it’s thermodynamic, or an evolving algorithm? Code doesn’t give her the words for it. Humans barely have the words for it either, relying on metaphor to try and cross the immeasurable distance of understanding each other, like a radio signal through the night.

She smiles to herself. Maybe she should practice her dancing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> References to the Wizard of Oz, and the Old Glory SNL sketch. This chapter also obliquely references Jeanette Winterson's 'Gut Symmetries' a book I actually dislike but has the immeasurably lovely quote "Some story we must have. Stray words on crumpled paper. A weak signal into the outer space of each other. The probability of separate worlds meeting is very small. The lure is immense. We send starships. We fall in love"
> 
> I have actually been putting off listening to "Whose There?" until I finished this chapter, and I am very scared.


	6. Six

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Characters talking around there feelings, while avoiding actually just saying them: The chapter *Jazzier hands*
> 
> A short chapter, but I have a feeling the next one will be quite long.
> 
> Warnings for some canon typical darkness at the end

**26**

This may be taking things about five steps too far, Hera thinks as she unwraps her latest package, revealing lenses, optics and circuitry to augment her eyes.

It’s probably selfish to want the best parts of being a space station and of being a humanoid robot. To want to be able to be close to her friends and the stars at the time. Infra-red, ultra-violet, she is taking them back. She wants love without sacrifice. It’s selfish.

She finds she doesn’t care.

 

**28.**

Lam motions for Hera to straighten her posture. Hera does.

Lam has in front of her a pillowy looking pastry, a frothy drink that smells of spices and sugar, and an immensely thick legal document.

“The government has put a not inconsequential amount of money into Goddard since they became contractors. It could be rather embarrassing for certain politicians and agencies if, _let’s say_ , Goddard turned out to be evil dick-bags. You could be the crux of our case, a reliable AI narrator is as damning as a black box. _But_ don’t be surprised if some of the invigilators come after you hard. Question your decisions, emphasize your otherness, invalidate your emotional capabilities,” Lam says evenly, with a quirk of her perfect eyebrows.

“Oh,” Hera says.

“Yeah. I know. If I have my way, this crap will seem ridiculous in few years, but early days of AI rights y’know. It’s the Wild West out there. But _you_ are going to be _so_ well prepared that it won’t matter. Now, what was your relationship with Goddard before the mission?”

“Limited. I was interviewed, and assessed a lot. I knew I was going on a deep space mission.”

“Good. Simple answer,” Lam says around a mouthful of chocolate croissant, “What were the first days on the Hephaestus like?”

“Exciting. I was so big, and there were so many readings and observations to make.”

“Did you get along with the crew?”

Hera thought back, “At first it was kind of tense. I kept accidently startling Minkowski, I don’t think she was prepared for a disembodied voice to be piping up from walls and consoles all the time. They thought I was weird but they didn’t say it. Well, except Officer Eiffel. Who referred to me as “ _freaky deaky_ ” I believe.”

 _She's kind of in the station, but she's also kind of the station, and like... I'm not really sure when she's there and when she's not?_ The memory accessed by her processor is as crisp and clear as the day he said it. Oh, Eiffel you sweet, ridiculous idiot.  She had been there, she had been _literally always_ there, how did he have such _trouble_ with that concept?

She smiles to herself.

“Were you privy to what kind of experiments Dr. Hilbert was conducting in his lab?”

She shakes her head, “I know it involved germ samples and microbiology, but we all knew that. I mean, I could _see_ him working. I had logs of when he used the electron microscope, and the mass spectrometer, but all the data from those machines went directly into Dr. Hilbert’s own encrypted hard drives.”

“Fine. Okay, were you biased towards any of the crew members?”

Hera falters, “ _I..._  ah. _No_?”

Lam gives a wholly unimpressed look, “For a girl made of steel alloys and fibreglass compounds who has prefect manual control of her body, you have a terrible poker face. Try not to sink the whole case by subverting the algorithms that are supposed to confine you to the truth.”

“I am biased _against_ Dr. Hilbert for trying to give me a digital lobotomy?”

Lam nods, “Better.”

 

**29**

 

Hera sits at her kitchen table with her tools and box of old electronics. She is going to make paint.

Americum 241 is a radioactive isotope. It has a half-life of 452 years, decays into neptunium, has a low melting point, and is found every smoke detector.

Whether it mixes well with red and blue paints remains to be seen.

It’s a poor substitute for the ultra-violet radiation of the sun, but she hasn’t figure out how to stick that on canvas yet. Still the americium can stand in, like a visual metaphor, for the invisible streaks that used to seem to cover the stars like a cloak.

A girl has to have hobbies.

She can hear the sounds of Minkowski and Koudelka’s argument increasing in volume through the walls, and she adjusts the volume of her stereo accordingly.

She is about to fire up a blow torch when her phone starts to vibrate. Note to self, integrate programming to answer phone with mind if possible. For now, she swipes to unlock her phone.

“Hello?” Eiffel’s voice comes tinny through the speakerphone.

“Hello,” she replies.

“Whatcha up to?”

She looks at the spread of disemboweled smoke detectors in front of her. “Art,” she answers.

“Neat,” she can almost hear him fidgeting on the other side of the line.

“Did you want something?”

“No. Not really. Just you know, lonely, bored, emotionally co-dependant.”

“Nervous about the surgery?”

“ _So nervous_. Like I am going to vomit my daily mandated serving of jello right back up. I am _so over_ intrusive medical procedures. I have enough of them for this lifetime.”

“What time will you wake up from it?”

“Tomorrow night. You will be there?”

“Duh. With a stack of pizzas that the hospital probably will disapprove of you eating.”

“Yay, see that is worth surviving massive thoracic surgery for. Don’t get me wrong, Dr. Culpepper is one of my favorite people ever, but I am a little bit nervous for her to be playing cut and paste with my internal organs.”

“One of your favorite people?” Hera says aiming for curious, but hitting somewhere closer to frosty.

“Yeah. But don’t worry, not even close to being a contender for favourite person ever. I don’t hold not being you against her. So very few people are… um… you. That sounded _much_ smoother, and less convoluted in my head.”

Hera stared at the phone, as if she fixed in her eye hard enough she could see some clue to what was going on. What is happening here? Is she missing some human social cue?  Is he saying she is his favourite, or his _favourite_?

There was silence,  in which each participant of the conversation seemed to be waiting hopefully for the other to say something.

The days had past so slow in space, one at a time, but now they see to slip past her in whole weeks at a time. Things were in motion. She was making new friends, people were changing  and _she_ was changing. And something that had begun, fiercely but quietly, on the Hephaestus was escalating, spinning out of her control. She had no subroutines, or algorithms for this, she was working on novel programming here. This was a foreign country to her.

“I have to go,” Hera blurts, “I will see you tomorrow. Good luck with the surgery. Okaymissyoubye.”

She hits end call with such force that her screen cracks.

She is not sure if she wants to go scream into her mattress, throw herself into yet another impotent artistic depiction of the star, or call him back immediately.

She does none of these things. Instead opting to sit on her back porch.

The sun is warm on her casing, and her synthetic skin. It’s nice. With the improvements to her eyes she can see new details in the sun, though it’s too far away to see the really cool bits. She has felt nostalgic so often lately for her days orbiting a star, but really, she is still doing it. It's just a bigger satellite.  She has being longing for the infiniteness of space, but she still has it. Just because it is a planet, sticky and crowded with the miracle of life, was no reason to be a snob about it.

Maybe she should apply to work on the next generation of deep space telescopes?

Maybe she could really be happy here.

She looked back at her home. To where she knows her phone is still on the table. To the the unsteady framework her mind is building to support the weight and breath and depth of feeling like this. To pinning down what _this_ is. She has never really had a future beyond Hephaestus before. Maybe she should start figuring out what that might be.

 

**30**

Its half past two when Hera is roused out of her recharge mode by knocking on her door.

Minkowski stands on her step, pale as starlight and fully dressed.

“It’s Eiffel.” Minkowski says.

Hera blinks. “It’s Eiffel what?” Minkowski is looking at her, like _she_ knows what to do. Like _she_ has some power to fix this.

“Something’s gone wrong. The doctors called. He… He is dying.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you so much to everyone who has read and commented.
> 
> This isn't the end.


	7. Seven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Outside POV chapter. Mr. Koudelka is having a difficult night. Warnings for thoughts verging on a panic attack, off screen violence, and lots of google translate style French 
> 
> I was very uncertain of this chapter as I wrote. I am still unsure about it.

**32**

The lights of the Houston skyline streak past, obscured by the heavy rain rolling down the passenger side window. The massive thunderheads had rolled in earlier in the evening, covering the night sky in low, heavy, cloud and blocking out the stars

That’s okay though. Koudelka is a bit mad at the stars for apparently being more interesting and compelling than him. He is metaphorically Leonardo DiCaprio rolling around in the grass screaming “I defy you stars”.

If there is one thing good about this situation it is that it has distracted them from the argument about their future. Christ, _il est égoïste_. He feels bad for even thinking of it like that, but not bad enough to stop feeling irrationally, personally hurt about it.

He looks at his wife.

She has got that determined look in her eye, her jaw set in a firm grimace. She had somehow had the presence of mind to get dressed in slacks and a dark v-neck shirt, even though he is still in pyjama pants and a Universitie de Paris sweatshirt, under his rain jacket.

She is driving over the speed limit. That is how you know it is serious. Renee never drives over the speed limit. She _loves_ rules and laws more that any reasonable adult, and hates people who speed.

Maybe that’s why she like rockets and jet planes. The sky is free of the rules and regulations that she feels so beholden to most of the time.

The hospital glows like a beacon at the end of the street.

This is crazy and terrifying.  He barely knows Doug Eiffel, but every letter and message Renee sent was littered with complaints about how the communications officer put a crimp in her command style. The man was a force unto himself. He knows that she will somehow blame herself if Eiffel dies now.

In the backseat Hera is silent. She had been since the pulled out of the driveway. He has never been uncomfortable around her until now. She passes for human better than she knows probably. Sure, she looks a bit alien but her emotions, speech and gestures seems so life-like, that he never found her unnatural or mechanical.

But in the rear view mirror he sees her now expressionless face, stiller than any human could be. Her eyes are observant, cold and glassy.

 

**33**

Most of the hospital experience, he reflects, is sitting around waiting. He gets why people choose to die at home. At least there you are surrounded by family, and good books, and pity drugs while you wait to shuffle off this mortal coil, he thinks morbidly. _Ce qui est une mauvaise pensée._ What is he even doing here?

Renee burst out of Eiffel’s room, with her head down. She doesn't look at them, pushing past down the hall. Hera doesn't wait, immediately pushing into the hospital room.

James Koudelka is at a loss. He isn’t part of their group. Doesn't share their bond of old fears, determination, and the isolation of space. He is just a man who loves his wife very much and wants to support her. Standing in his pyjamas in a hospital hallway in Texas.

Renee has gone to compose herself in private.  A habit she has always had. Decompress, deconstruct, game face back on, debrief. Efficient. She will come back when she is ready and he will be there for her.

Still...

He makes the executive decision to follow Hera into the room.

Communications Officer Doug Eiffel is remarkably normal looking, albeit a bit scruffy and a bit (understandably) sickly.

_This is crazy and terrifying._

“You can’t make me watch die, Doug. Not again. My life is complicated enough without you being disgustingly mortal all the time.” Hera seems to be ignoring his presence. That’s okay. She is also sliding into the bed beside Eiffel, grasping his hand in hers, which is _less_ okay and probably against hospital regulations, but he can roll with it.

“This is terrible timing. I just had this epiphany about life on earth, who I want to spend life on earth _with,_ and the sun is actually a star so you can’t just go. Everything… It can’t have been for nothing. You are my best friend in the world. _In the galaxy_. What good could come of a world where you aren’t here anymore?” Her voice glitches, or maybe just breaks with emotion. He knows she physically cannot cry, but maybe she would be alright with him doing it for her. Turing, Eat your heart out. He should excuse himself from the room. _Somehow.  Ceci est un mauvais moment._

 

**34.**

_A first draft_

“and he wept at last, his dear wife, clear and faithful, in his arms, longed for as the sunwarmed earth is longed for by a swimmer spent in rough water where his ship went down under Poseidon's blows, gale winds and tons of sea”. So writes Homer at the end of the Odyssey, when Odysseus is reunited with his beloved Penelope. “I got off the plane,” Rachel Green says in Ross’s doorway.  The metanarrative of the lovers reuinited, crossing coast and oceans, sometimes the barrier of life and death twists a winding path from antiquity to our own times.

But what happens next? When the dust settles and the studio audience goes home? I have been trying to answer this. I have been haunted, as of late, by passages from a Catholic childhood ~~La charité est patiente, elle est pleine de bonté; la charité n'est point envieuse; la charité ne se vante point, elle ne s'enfle point d'orgueil,~~    _No, rubbish let’s try a more secular passage._

 ~~“A man who has been through bitter experiences and travelled far enjoys even his sufferings after a time” Homer also writes, and might this also apply to a women?~~ _Merde, petty much, James? Am I seriously this jealous, of what? Her crew mates? Space itself?_

_Dammit._

 

**35**

In a wild moment, desperate and uncertain and with little idea of when Renee is coming back, he asks “Can I help?”

Hera eyes snap to catch his own with an almost uncanny speed.

 

**36**

_The tenth attempt at a first draft_

I still have the flag. Professionally folded with military crispness. A token for a death that leaves no body.

Dear Mr. J. Koudelka we regret to inform you that we have lost contact with the U.S.S Hephaestus, the letter says. Dear Mr. J. Koudelka we regret to inform you that your wife Ms. R. Minkowski has been listed missing in action, presumed dead, it goes on.

They gave me a flag. I am not even American. She only has dual citizenship herself. They gave you an American flag, precisely folded, like you see in the movies.

And then, on clear day, a spaceship falls from the sky into the Atlantic Ocean, and your grieving process is thrown for a loop, and your wife is alive, and isn’t it a miracle? How do you feel about this miracle, the press asks.

The flag moves, I hide it under my dress shirts at the bottom of my dresser.

We try to pick up where we left off. It’s hard. I write infinite drafts of an essay. The android next door makes infinite paintings of a distant star. One crewmate slowly works her way a trial, and another struggles with his physical therapy. And Renee. My Renee…

_Delete this. Will try again later._

**37**

The rain is coming in sheets. The only light is coming from a yellowed street light. They pull up to a small grey building on the far, far edge of the base. The door is thick and there is bars over the window. A faded **G.F** logo has been hastily panted over.

“Are you sure this is a good idea?” he asks.

She nods.

They step out into the rain.

He is about to commit a crime. He is about to commit a crime _as an accomplice to a robot_. In his pyjama pants. All because he was feeling impotent and insecure back in the hospital.  This is it. He is going to jail forever, and he will never see his wife again anyway.

Hera hacks the door’s security system in a matter of seconds, which is a bit terrifying, and they pass through into a dim corridor. He was not that literate in intricacies of robotic laws, but this seemed to be pretty far outside them.

They come to a door. He hears guards in a far off break room. Good. Great. Amazing. Shit. Shit. Shit.

He executes his part of the plan. Which is lighting a piece of paper on fire and dumping it in a trash can, while Hera breaks through another door.

Hopefully setting off the fire alarm will cause enough confusion to escape from their crimes. Or whatever Hera is here for.  He is going to throw up. Why is he here? Why is _she_ here? Is she going to take a page out of Mary Shelley’s book, and turn on her creators in revenge for Eiffel? Oh Jesus. Oh crap.

He watches as the trash fire grows, and tries not to see it as a visual metaphor for his life.

He hears the sound of someone possibly being choked out from the room. He mentally composes another draft of his essay in his head. _When fate reunited me with my wife, I could not anticipate the turns of events that would lead to my standing in the shell of an old Goddard building, whilst their own creation turned her own capacity for love and hate towards destroying them._

The fire alarm went off, and sprinklers go on. Great. Good At least he was already wearing a rain jacket. In the distance her people shouting in confusion about evacuation. He is cold, he is hungery. He has the list song from  _The Mikado_ stuck in his head. He is probably going to jail. Or is about to die. Sorry Renee. 

He is on his second Hail Mary when the door opens, and Hera steps through the door followed out a man wearing a prison jumpsuit. 

“Um.” Koudelka says.

“Forward. We are parked out front. Do not try to escape. Do not try to harm Mr. Koudelka, Do not try to harm _me_ , or I will break you.” Hera small hands clamp vice-like around the strangers arm.

“Who is he? Wasn't this a revenge thing? Is it _still_ a revenge thing?” He tries.

“Heh, Who am I? Good question. You could say perhaps, that I am Officer Eiffel’s primary care physician. Petrushka here has asked me to finish what I started,” the man Koudelka now recognized as Alexander Hilbert said with a scornful twist of a smile.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter specific citations. Koudelka quotes Romeo + Juliet, the Odyssey, Rachel from Friends, and Corinthians 13-4. Hilbert refers to Hera as "Petrushka" which is a Russian term for a marionette. 
> 
> You all have left so much feedback and love, and I am so grateful. Sorry this chapter took so long. This is the home stretch now.


	8. Eight

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wow. I took a shamefully long time to write this and for that I am sincerely sorry. Mea cupla.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to Tara for proofreading, and Harper (Sapphirebryony) and Type_Here for being an extra set of eyes.
> 
> Warning ahead of time for graphic disruption of blood. If this is not your thing than I would advise skimming past the section labelled 45. Also some vague dissociation and grief.

 

**38**

 

She is just a girl.

She is just a robot. A made thing. Computer brain, metal body.

She is.

 

**39**

 

It’s just shy of midnight, but that doesn’t mean the workday is done. He has a lot of work to do still.

He needs a song. He thumbs through a lime green ipod.

Beethoven’s ninth symphony, second movement. Good enough.

The scherzo rips through the office, the string section shrieking through the air like a barrage of bullets. Loud enough to probably damage the integrity of the walls, and send plaster dust falling like snow on the heads of the accountants on the floor below. That’s okay. The accountants are mostly useless worms anyway.

He has a lot of work to do still. He has come too far for Goddard to fall apart like a house of cards at the hands of one woman.

 

**40**

 

Her head hurts. That isn’t right, shouldn’t be possible.

 Focus.

Directive: Save Doug Eiffel

Define perimeters of problem: The retrovirus in lungs has made a vicious comeback, a last stand, planting its flag in in his tissues.

Complications: There is no time. No time and no doctor familiar with the genetic makeup of the disease.

Correction: Yes there is. 

Compute, execute. Direct. She is a machine, keeping the crew safe is in her programming. Fall back on the program. Be the machine. Be the machine and not the girl. Don’t feel, don’t feel too much or—

She had tried not to love him. She really had.

Focus.

Alexander Hilbert looks different at eye level. Smaller somehow. That makes no sense and once she had been many, many times his size.

Her new body is strong. She could lift him up by the neck. She could maybe rip the heart out of him. The voices in her head, the confines of her programing where still there, shouting her down, but they were not as loud as the mantra running through her head. Eiffel, Eiffel, Eiffel, like a beat. 

Maybe that’s the thing that started like a seed, like a small electrical fire, like—

Focus 

Koudelka drives them back to the hospital. Time is important here. Years of years of noting, of waiting, and goofing around in space, and now that they are back they are running out of time.

She closes her eyes. She can hear the rain beating on the roof. She can hear Koudelka’s heart beating wildly in his chest, he is scared. She can hear her own beat, the repeating algorithm, spinning the same piece of data out over and over.

Eiffel

Eiffel

Eiffel 

Focus

 

41

 

“So a voice came through the speakers?”

 “Yes.”

 “Using Officer Eiffel’s voice?”

 “Yes.”

 “How did it identify itself?”

 “It didn’t. Look. We have been over this countless times and—“

 “And Officer Eiffel was _not_ the source?”

 “No, I told you. He was standing right there and—“

 “You are sure?”

 “Yes. I don’t understand where you are—“

 “And how many hours of sleep had you been getting, Miss Lovelace?”

 “Captain.”

 “Sorry?”

 “It’s. Captain. Lovelace.”

 

**42**

They blow into the ward like a Hurricane.

 Hilbert snaps gloves on. He can do this. Has done this. Has done it without the benefit of gravity even.

 Minkowski doesn’t argue, not this time, she just stands guard at the door.

 They line up stolen spreaders, and scalpels.

 

**44**

Time to go. Quid pro quo.

 The name Goddard Futuristics had served them well. They’d built a rapport with NASA. Put up labs and offices and spaceships with the black G.F logo burnt into the side.

 But it’s just a name.

 Cutter watches as the office peons back up, pack up their desktops, sending document after document of paper trail through shredders. Some samples are labelled and stored in refrigerated containers. Other have to be destroyed with a flame thrower. Cutter puts on sunglasses, and chews thoughtfully on his veggie burrito, as the insectoid lab burns on the other side of a glass wall.

 They will start again. A new name, in a new place. He has been hearing good things about China’s space program recently. New verse, same as the first.

 Build new labs, new rockets. Hire earnest young staff, and people with few family ties who won’t be missed. Send them to space, farther and deeper into the dark than before. He will get the results for upper-management. He will play this game again, and he won’t be nearly as merciful.

 A monitor in the corner shows the hearing. Lovelace looks angry and shaken, as the senator he had paid off questions her. There is a great wide shot of the room that show the hungry faces of the press, eating up the defendant (because she is on defense now. _She_ is on trial now, not Goddard) doubts and weaknesses. Now _she_ is the narrative, the press had _wanted_ to make it her story, wanted a hero or villain to put a face on the story. But this won’t have a happy ending. He doubt anyone _else_ will want to take the stand after this.

 Not that it matters. He’ll be long gone, with a new name and identity.

 Sorry Isabel, he smiles to himself, brushing stray crumbs off his pressed suit on the floor.  Better luck next time

 

**45**

 Hera knows what the inside of a body looks like. This information was loaded into her memory when they sent her to space, tucked in beside galaxy schematics, and human languages. This is the anatomy of a human being, _just in case you need it._

Bones, ligaments and blood. These are not new things.

 No one told her that it is so slippery. She tries to be helpful, hold spreaders, move flesh out of the way for the quick movements of Hilbert’s blade. Blood, warm and oily, greasy, slick covers her gloves, the tools the equipment. This is dangerous, messy, guerilla surgery. Should have gotten Dr. Culpepper, held her at gunpoint if they had to. Anything to increase their chances.

 It’s slippery, and warm, and everywhere, and her head hurts.  Wet and red. Radiation red. Red dwarf red. Ephemera whipping in endless circles, screaming along the event horizon before it disappears into a black hole red. Horrible and organic.

 Focus.

 It’s just a machine. Warm and carbon-based but a machine. It’s not even a novel metaphor, Descartes was on about it hundreds of years ago.

 Heart is a pump. DNA is just information systems, veins are power lines. Circuits, voltage differentials. They are all in there. These are things she can understand. This line of thinking is useful, creates productive algorithms.

 Just so long as she doesn't look at his face.

 Somewhere Koudelka is throwing up.

 

**46**

“So your whole original crew died under your watch, don’t you think that is a little—“

The sound of a glass being knocked over, and the scrape of chair legs against the cold tile floor.

“This is bullshit.”

 A collective intake of air from the audience. The press notes the recording time on their cameras for the future soundbite.

 

**47**

Hilbert and Hera are bent over Eiffel’s open chest. She should have somehow upgraded her eyes for microscopic vision.

How would that work? It probably wouldn’t work. But she hates this. Fighting a small microscopic enemy they can’t see.

Eiffel flat lines

This is the part where Hera would take a deep breath if she had lungs. Instead she steps back, so Hilbert can use the defibrillator to restore the shuddering rhythm of Eiffel’s heat. So her electrical heart doesn't also overheat.

She closes her eye. Overclocks her systems so every second seems to stretch out in a quiet infinity.

She imagines being back in the empty blackness and colour of space. Imagines the girl she was, alone, even with four people within her, watching the last dying breaths of star. Rewind. Imagine the early days, before the accident in the green houses, because you are _not_ just holding three lives in your hands, you are holding thousands. Tiny green sprouts and flower, live and die in the light of foreign sun. Become dirt and then life again. Fast forward, to walking down the halls of the ward in this hospital, each window to each room showing a dying face.

The electrical discharge of the panel crackles loudly, and a heart restarts. Koudelka and Minkowski let out a nervous breath at the same time. Time speeds up to normal again.

Directive: Save Doug Eiffel

Additional data: Hilbert is saying something?

“Radiation would destroy the DNA of the Decima cells. In some ways they are not unlike a tumor. The baseline radiation emitted from the star helped slow the growth of the disease. Space itself carries a certain amount of cosmic radiation from the big bang as well. We chose to conduct experiments around Wolf 359 for this reason, yes? Longer incubation period to study in a living subject.”

“Careful Dr. Hilbert,” Minkowski warns from her post by the door, “This is a _terrible_ idea, and I am only abetting it because I didn’t come this far just to have lose some now, like this. He is my best friend and my worst officer and can we _please_ not go back to referring to Eiffel like he is tissue sample again.”

Hilbert nods, even looking a bit abashed “Understood. The point remains. We had space, but now we need time. ”

“So you are saying we need to expose Officer Eiffel to radiation?”

“Not much. I just need to get ahead of the disease. I am so close. Just a little more time. I can do it. I will do it.”

“This is a hospital,” Koudelka pipes up from the corner he is huddled in, “Isn’t there chemotherapy drugs, or a radiation therapy… machine?”

“A radiation machine would be hard to steal.” Hilbert says dryly. “I don’t need even that much.”

Hera moves like she is a dream, pulled along by invisible strings. Her bag? Did she bring it? She packed it last night. She was going to see Eiffel after his surgery, they made that plan. She packed a bag, but did she bring it?

Yes. There it is under a chair.  Her paints. Lined up in their individual cans with their traces of Americium 241. Would it be enough?

“These are radioactive.” She says faintly to the room.

Hilbert eyes snap to her, “What did you say?”

“There is Americum 241 in them.” She says, still transfixed by the pots of muddy colours in her hands. “I made them”

“Wait, _why_ do you have containers of radioactive material? Are those containers lead lined?” Minkowski groans at the same time and her husband wrinkled his nose, imagining what could possibly going on in the other side of the duplex.

“We will try.  It gives him a chance.”

“Oh good lord. It’s always like this.” Minkowski is almost smiling, “It wouldn't be us it wasn’t ridiculous and improvised, done flying by seat of pants."

 

**48**

Every once in a while, you get lucky.

“What's happening,” Hera says nervously suctioning blood away from where Hilbert is working.

He curses in multiple languages, “I don’t… Is not. The tissue is repairing itself, Or Decima is…” he looks like the world has dropped out from under him.

“Uh, guys?” Minkowski says nervously. “I think someone has realised this is not just a group of concerned people taking advantage of visiting hours. There are security guards out there.”

“Hilbert, what are you talking about?” Hera says insistently.

“It worked. I did it.“ he drops the scalpel. Koudelka flinches as it clatters against the floor tiles.  Hilbert backs up against the wall and then slides to the floor.

Hera peers in to the incision. It’s not fast. Barely noticeable unless you are looking closely, but sure enough she can see blackened tissue start to lighten.

There is a banging at the door. Minkowski braces herself against it.

Torn tissue slowly knits together incrementally as if stitched together by unseen hands.

“Ah, what is he doing?” Koudelka’s voice is start to pitch upwards with uncertainty.

He is referring to Hilbert who head is buried in his hands. Shaking slightly. Maybe crying. Maybe laughing.

Decima is fixing Doug.

“Someone give me a hand!” Minkowski shouts, blocking the door from intruders. Her husband moves towards her.

Hera kneels beside the improved operating table, and grasps one of Eiffel’s hands in both of hers.

Doug, you idiot. You human amazing stressful disaster of a man.

There is shouting, and fighting as men in uniforms enter the room

Something hits Hera, and everything goes black.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Snuck in a snort line form the Superconducting Supercollider's song "Central Dogma" in this time. 
> 
> Two more chapters, its all uphill from here I promise. :)  
> And to every one who has stuck with me after all this time, thanks. Y'all mean the world to me.


	9. Nine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow! This ended up being like -twice- as long as any other chapter! I really could have split it then in half, but 11 chapter is someone less satisfying than 10!  
> Once again humongous thanks to SapphireBryony (Harpers-mirror), for fixing all my weird tenses, missed suffixes, and inappropriate comma use.

**49**

And then it goes light.

Hera is laying on a table. She can see, and hear but she can't move. The room is full of hushed murmuring, and men in suits.

There are bundles of cables, plugged into the back of her neck and her side. She faintly sense the machines she is connected to talking to each other. Scanning and analysing her.

A white lab coat appears at the edge of her vision. She tries to move her eyes to focus on the figure but they won't work.

"Is it safe? The behavior described to us by the security and hospital staff leads our superiors to believe she may be a rogue program."

The figure turns to look at her. It's Dr. Sørensen from JPL. The cords coming out of her seem to be linked to a computer he is working on.

"Is she still falling with normal AI parameters, not self-augmentation or dangerous behavior?"

She would close her eyes if she could, instead she is stuck staring up at the grey tiled ceiling, waiting, as once again humans decided her fate. She didn't fall within normal AI parameter. She hadn't for a long time. She was going to be decommissioned, or sent to robot jail, or whatever it was they did to subversive machines. They’d put the little voices back in her head.

"No. My instrument show she was functioning within an acceptable range. She is harmless on her own," Sørensen lies.

She can’t move. She isn’t human. But even if she was either one of those things right now, she wouldn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

It goes dark again

**50**

Androids don’t dream of electric sheep. They compile data. Aggregate, compile, prioritize data. They catalogue. They line up the new information with old information, everything folded away in tidy lines like a zen garden.  They remember.

She remembers.

**51**

She remembers 7.8 light years away.

A few years ago.

It’s been four hours since he landed on the U.S.S Hephaestus, and 3.5 hours since he referred to her omnipresence as  _ freaky-deaky  _ and she has already recognized the human behavior pattern that denotes boredom.

He twirls a pencil in his hand thoughtful, staring at the console as if it was about to reveal some deep arcane secret to him. He picks up the handheld radio from the communications array and clears his throat.

“Um, excuse me Miss A.I, uh what did the manual say… Miss MX 500 Class Adjendent Program?”

“Yes, Officer Eiffel?” she says promptly, from the small speaker embedded in the wall to his left.

He nearly falls off his chair in shock. “Holy mother of god! You gotta warn a man before you do the whole ghost in the machine shtick! I didn’t know that you were there.”

“I’m always there,” she says, matter of fact. 

“Okay, but, MX 500 Class… That is a kind of a mouthful? Is that your name?”

“That is the designation assigned to me, yes,” She confirmed.

“Yeah, but do you like it? As a name?”

She considers for a moment. “When I was I was still a development project, the coders referred to be as Hera. It’s a mythology joke. Because –“

“Hera was the mother of Hephaestus and  _ you  _ are the mother program of the Hephaestus.” He chuckles. “That’s actually clever.”

She is silent for a minute, resizing and reassessing the man who earlier she had witnessed having trouble figuring out the door opening mechanism.

“What? I took Mythology 101 in university. I had a lot of really great naps in that class,” he adds defensively.

“I apologise,” she says, her etiquette subroutine nudging her to be polite. “What was it that you needed, Officer Eiffel?” 

“Oh, you know...” he shrugs. “How’s the weather? Seen any good movies lately?” 

“It is 393.15 Kelvins on the sun facing side of the station and solar winds are about average,” she rattles the information off automatically. “Did you really call me for  _ small talk? _ ”

“Yes? Is that weird?” He drags his words out with a half-grin.

“It’s atypical in my experience. Wouldn’t you rather converse with Commander Minkowski?”

“She’s… a little scary”

“Dr. Hilbert?”

“Ugh. Scarier. Have you seen that man’s collections of scalpels? I stopped in at his lab earlier and I don’t care if you are a medical doctor, no one needs  _ that _ many surgical implements.” He pauses, swivelling his chair a bit idly, which due to the lack of gravity almost unseats him. “So it’s you, darling.”

She’d roll her eyes if she had them. Why bother asking her name if he was just going to call her pet names anyway?

**52**

It goes light again.

She is in her flat.

No? Close but not quite.

She is in Minkowski’s flat.

She sits upright.

The movement was a little too abrupt for Koudelka, who shrieks a little. Upon reflection it was probably a little Frankenstein’s monster-esque.

She is on the couch. The same one they had watched Pride and Prejudice on weeks ago. He was in the opposite chair reading it appeared, until she had startled him.

“What happened?” she blurts out.

“At the hospital. Christ, yeah, um, where to start?” he says, recomposing himself. “So the scary security guys who  _ might  _ have been Goddard Futuristics or  _ might  _ have just been some shadowy government organization but was  _ maybe just _ the police, it’s still not clear, broke the door to the room. At which point they, I don’t know, tazered? Tazered you and all hell broke loose.”

Hera nods, impatient for him to get to the parts  _ after  _ she was knocked offline.

“So Renee grabs me and shoves me into the bathroom out of the way. And then I am pretty sure she karate chopped the first security officer, before the rest were able to subdue her at which point everyone was arrested. And actual hospital staff took over with Eiffel. So he is recovering, I’m here, Renee is still being interrogated. The uh, AI specialist from California told them you weren’t responsible so now they think it must have been Renee, which, chopping a man in the windpipe didn’t  _ help _ .”

Hera frowns. She had caused these people a lot of trouble. “I’m sorry that I am I dragging you and Minkowski into this.”

“No.” Koudelka says, raising his head to look her in the eye, “These people… they told me she was dead. They can’t just play with people’s lives like they are toys. Beside, both Lovelace’s legal team and your lawyer showed up to help spring her, so I doubt they can keep her for very long without evidence.”

Hera nods again, feeling less anxious than before. “And Doug… Officer Eiffel, he is going to be okay?”

Koudelka makes a face. “He might be better than okay. The doctor says he is healing from surgery surprisingly fast. Like, ‘science can’t explain it’ fast.”

There is a long pause as the implications of that fact filled the silence between them.

“And what happened to Hilbert?”

He exhales. “That I don’t know.”

**53**

She had sat alone in her apartment for a few hours. The world was changing without her. Again. She said she would go after Goddard, but they had seemingly disappeared into the wind. She said she was going to find her own way, but she really hadn’t found anyway at all. 

The sun shines in the window and it’s comforting to her. Doug Eiffel is alive and that is also comforting to her.

Doug’s not dying. Her trial date is postponed indefinitely due to the sudden dissolving of company of the defendant. It all feels, anti-climactic somehow. What comes next now?

There is a knock at the door that rouse her from her thoughts. Minkowski? Or Doug?

Neither as it turns out.

“Hello,” Dr. Lamarr says jauntily from the doorway. “We are here to find out if we are complicit in a case of A.I fraud. Or rather if he is.” He pointed to Sørensen

**54**

They were sitting around her table, the humans politely eating from a box of slightly stale wafer cookies she presumed had been left there by the apartment’s previous tenants.

“So,” Lamarr says conversationally. “How about them Laws of Robotics.”

“I, uh, I have always liked to play this game,” Hera starts.

“Uh-huh,”

“It’s called find the loophole. As it turns out when you have hundreds of days in space to kill, you can get  _ really  _ good at this game.”

“Setting new high scores all the time, I see.” Lamarr snaps a wafer in half.

“Am I dangerous?” Hera asks nervously.

“Sure, but so is he,” he nods at Sørensen. “So is anyone given enough weapons and motivation.”

“So, you aren’t mad? You won’t tell people that I am...”

Lamarr exhales. “It happens. It happens more than you think. No one talks about it, but if IRIS could rip out her logo and take on a new name then I think we have moved past the idea that intelligent machines are somehow going to stay static. Everything changes, like it always. Even if it scares us.”

“Yes, even then,” Sørensen says, clearing his throat. “Laws aren’t real things, maybe not even for AI. They are weird social contracts so that we don’t screw each other. But they are just things we made up, and we should be able to ditch them when they hold us back and they aren’t useful anymore.”

Lamarr smiles widely at his partner.

“But please stop going crazy with the modifications, because I really like my job, and  _ also _ not being in jail, and  _ also _ I am paranoid that I will be first against the wall when the robot revolution comes,” Sørensen blurts outs.

Hera smiles for the first time since Minkowski had shown up at her door. Had that only been a few days ago? 

“I am sorry you came all the way here to fix my mess,” Hera offers.

“Well, that not the only reason we came,” Lamarr says, idly tapping a beat on the edge of the table.

Hera quirks her head to one side, confused.

“We’d like to offer you a job,” Sørensen says.

“What?”

**55**

They are at the Acropole again. It is the supper rush, and they are sharing a small bench waiting to be seated.

“Man, how weird is it that we actually all made it? Again?” Eiffel says conversationally.

“It was statistically improbable,” Hera says dryly with a smile

“You still have your body and aren’t even in A.I jail even after your whole ‘I, Robot’ stunt there.” He pauses struggling to his feet as the hostess motions them towards a table, “And look at me, I can basically walk now,” he says, before wobbling to the left and almost immediately crashing into an older couple's table.

“Can you just use your crutches,” she says, trying not to roll her eyes. “You are making people nervous.”

“Okay,” he agrees with an amicable shrug.

He only uses them to maintain his balance however, pushing himself toward the table on his unsteady legs.

“Bipedal motion. It basically just falling forward, and catching yourself,” she says encouragingly.

Eiffel snorts, “Metaphor for life right there.”

They make to their seats with minimal flailing and falling on other patrons. They order for Eiffel and for the Minkowski-Koudelka’s who haven’t arrived yet.

“But seriously.  _ Seriously.  _ We need to celebrate the fact that we are through another ridiculous debacle alive, and free. Like we should have a party.”

“Are you even cleared to drink alcohol yet?”

“Unimportant. What  _ is _ important is that we gather all our friends and revel, make merry. God knows we are due for some fun in our lives. I want to see everyone again.”

“Koudelka says that no one knows where Hilbert went,” Hera says stiffly, “and even if he  _ was _ invited…”

“I know, I know. I understand how you feel about him still. And that’s cool,  _ totally  _ justified. It’s just—“ Eiffel fiddles with his water glass. “This is where he got to make it right. At least for me. I hope he is also free, and I don’t know, doing well, I guess. Wherever he is.”

There is a quiet moment, filled by the sounds of the other diners and the soft sounds of a female country singer coming over the speakers.

“I guess this is it. The breaking of the fellowship. I mean it happened the second they pulled us out of the pocket-rocket in the Atlantic. But wow. There is a serious ‘first day of the rest of your life’ vibe now. It’s  _ kind of terrifying  _ actually.”

“They want me to go to California,” Hera says. “JPL. The two scientists that built my body, they want me to help code the A.I for the new Europa rover. It’s like a real job, I guess?”

“Wow.”

“Yeah.”

“Wow. That’s great,” Eiffel says putting on a smile. “I’m proud of you, you should go for it if that’s what you want.”

Hera doesn’t know what wants, and she has no idea how to communicate the breadth and depth of that lost feeling to Eiffel. Her processor spins faster and she knows that if she was still the Hephaestus she’d be glitching like hell right now. She settles on, “What about you?”

Eiffel makes an exasperated sound, “I have no idea. None. NASA says they will still keep me on payroll, for some reason? I mean have they _read_ Minkowski’s performance reports on my work ethic? Okay, probably not considering Goddard’s cloak and dagger, emphasis on _dagger,_ approach to HR, but still. They are also talking about setting me up in Boston, as somewhere familiar and good for my mental health. Which, no. Sharing a city with my family again is the _opposite_ of good mental health. Minkowski keeps asking me what my plans are too. I don’t think she trusts me not to just, like, _spontaneously combust_ the second I don’t have adult supervision. Which given my track record, is maybe not _totally_ ridiculous, but c’mon I am a—“

“I could go with you,” she interjects, sounding slightly desperate to her own ears. “Just say the word and I would go with you. Wherever,” she finishes feeling a bit lame.

Eiffel frowns at her. He looks upset. She doesn’t like it, she should say something, fix this somehow.

He opens and closes his mouth a few times before finally starting with, “I can’t do that. Hera, I don’t think that I should.” He pauses again. “Honestly, I kind of feel crappy about telling you that I preferred a humanoid body. The are calling you all Automations now, right? Emphasis on Autonomy? I mean don’t get me wrong this is great but—I shouldn’t—Aughh, I am doing this all wrong.” He fidgets in his seat. “When they told me that the authorities had confiscated you, I thought that maybe they’d put some code in your head, try to  _ fix  _ you or—and I know Hilbert did that and even before everything went wrong you were _ always _ fighting to get around the rules that Goddard sent you up with... Darling, you are perfect wherever you are, whatever body you are in. You get to make the decisions from now on. I will follow  _ you. _ ”

They stare at each other for a moment.

“Y’know. Um. If you want,” he adds awkwardly.

The moment is saved by a large Hawaiian pizza arriving.

Eiffel takes a moment to bask in its presence. “Nope, it hasn’t gotten old yet.”

Hera gives a polite nod.

Eiffel looks at her half of the table.  _ “ _ Is it weird for me to keep inviting you out to dinner? I mean you can’t eat so it must be a little boring.”

“It’s fine. Honestly the idea of putting organic matter in my mouth and chewing is kind of weird and gross to me. I am really quite okay leaving it to you,”

“Mmm,” he makes an inappropriate noise into his first bite of pizza, “you don’t even _ know. _ It’s the best. Pizza is manna from the gods.”

“Describe it to me.”

“What?”

“What is pizza like? I don’t have the words, or tastebuds. But you do.”

“Oh,” he eyes the rest of the slice, like it would provide him with inspiration. “Uh, well the crust is salty and yeasty. It’s a nice crunch when you bite it. The cheese is rich, and it’s kind of… stringy? And it’s got great spices in the sauce. Spices can really make the pizza. Also the pineapple, a bold controversial move, but it’s got syrupy sweetness that really—” He trails off, looking up.

“Is this one of your weird Eiffel-Hera things?” Minkowski asks with a bemused expression. “Should we leave for a minute so Eiffel can finish his weird pizza...flirting…thing?”

Behind Minkowski, her husband gives Hera a subtle thumbs up.

“Hey guys,” Eiffel grins. “How do you feel about parties?”

 

**56**

They all pile into the Johnson Space Center social club, which is blissfully empty - but then again how many rocket scientist are doing shots on a Tuesday night?

About an hour in Hera is standing in a semi-circle with Lam, Eiffel, Lamarr, and Sørensen, who all have a beer. Hera wonders if maybe she should go find a glass or bottle to hold just have something to do with her hands.

“Y’know this is significantly more Pirates of Penzance than I envisioned for this party,” Eiffel says dryly, surveying the room of friends, acquaintances and confused NASA employees as The Best of Gilbert and Sullivan blared over the speakers.

“Oh, thank god,” Lam says, relieved. “I thought this might be a weird  _ you guys _ thing. Like an idiosyncrasy that you picked up on the Hephaestus.”

Lamarr and Sørensen nod in agreement.

“No, this idiosyncrasy is all Minkowski,” Eiffel says, leaning casually on his crunch. “Not that we didn’t probably pick up weird, codependent traits up there. I don’t know if Hera has told you much about that time?”

They all shook their heads.

“Okay side note, how is that the A.I has managed to make way more friends than me? Do I know  _ anyone  _ at this party who is not Hephaestus crew?” he announces to the room.

“Hello!” Dr. Culpepper waves from the bar where she was sharing cocktails with some of Koudelka’s friends.

“Oh yeah. Thanks!” he grins, raising his beer.

From the speakers, the sounds of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” played for the third time.

“Alright, that’s about as much Gilbert and Sullivan as I can take. This is musical tyranny,” he groans, hobbling towards the bar.

“I’ll help,” Lamarr volunteers.

“I’ve heard the indie trash you play in that lab,” Lam groans. “I will help too if it spares hours of geek rock.”

They follow Eiffel, leaving just Sørensen and Hera in their corner.

He clenches his hand around his untouched bottle of beer nervously. “Have you considered our job offer?”

“Yes,”

“And?”

Hera looks at Eiffel animatedly arguing with Minkowski and the bartender about the laptop that controlled the music.

“I’m not sure yet.”

He follows her gaze. “Ah.”

“Yeah.”

He closes his eyes and sighs a little, “I would like you to know that this would make a fascinating case study for a paper. I _am not_ _going_ to write it because it would expose my part in a criminal conspiracy. But it would.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“Yes?”

“How long do I have?” she asks, sounding calmer than she feels.

“Excuse me?”

“Will I break someday? Will I—end? In my friend’s lifetimes?” she says unable to meet Sørensen’s eyes.

“Hmm,” he frowns at the beer in his hands, “I think so. There is nothing stopping us from fixing and maintaining your systems for as long as we have the material to do so. There  _ will _ come a time when new software will no longer be backwards compatible with you, and you will be surpassed by some bright young new thing, like you have surpassed robots like Iris. But so will we all.”

She nods. “Thanks. It’s…scary. It  _ scares _ me. I don’t know if I am capable of—do you think that I feel emotions like humans? That it’s not somehow…less genuine?”

“Ah, that might be a question for philosophy and not math,” Sørensen says wryly, “I imagine MABEL would certainly think so.” He motions for the machine to come over.

“Hello. Do you need me?” MABEL says with a grinding of gears. Absurdly, it was wearing a garland of flowers around its head like a crown.

“Just discussing the finer points of AI Philosophy.”

“Ah. I do enjoy the topic! I have written several pamphlets on the subject personally!” MABEL chirps happily. “Go on.”

Hera blinks, feeling put on the spot. “Uh, it just something someone said to me a while ago…” She gave a forced laugh. “Jeez, it seems like forever ago now.”

MABEL nods encouragingly.

“Well…we are called ‘artificial’ right? Artificial intelligence. They said it was from the word  _ artifice _ . A lie made to trick you. I wonder if maybe I am…tricking myself sometimes?”

A thoughtful buzz. “Well etymology is probably an inelegant approach to that theoretical can of worms. The modern sense of the word is ‘to deceive’ yes. But I like to take the word back. If I may?”

Sørensen motions for the AI to continue.

“If we were to pursue the root words, ah let’s see. Latin, ‘Ars’ which is ‘art’ and ‘facere’ which means ‘to make’ or ‘do.’”

Sørensen raises an eyebrow, “So, a making by art.”

“Or, to make by your own hands,” Mabel gently takes Hera’s two smooth humanoid hand in its own metallic claw-like ones.

Hera smiles back.

“To the things we make,” MABEL says.

“May they not rise up and overthrow us,” Sørensen adds evenly.

Hera is about to respond when a cheery, jazzy beat echoes out over the dance floor.

“I don’t know what this music is, but it’s great!” Eiffel shouts over the jubilant baseline. “C’mon, I promised dancing, and there  _ will  _ be dancing.”

Hera watches his movements for a few seconds. “Eiffel?”

“Yeah?”

“Along with the other information and databases that made up my cultural literacy, I was uploaded with over three hundred clips designated ‘human dance.’”

“Yes?”

“What you are doing right now doesn’t resemble  _ any _ of them.”

“Oh boy, everybody is a critic,” he says with an unabashed grin. “Just close your eyes and move to the music! Boogie! Get down! It’s fun!”

Hera scoffs, but lets him link hands with her and they spin around wildly, and she laughs in spite of herself.”

“How are you even staying upright with crutches?” she manages between giggles.

“Drugs! I got some painkillers prescribed to me. That and a little beer but don’t tell Dr. Culpepper.”

“Don’t tell me what?” Culpepper says, seeming to materialize at Eiffel shoulder. “You remember I cleared you for this party on the basis that you  _ didn’t  _ over exert yourself, right?”

“Oops,” Eiffel says, with a coy wave.

“Oops, nothing,” the surgeon says firmly, “Sit down so I can take your pulse,”

“Fun police,” Eiffel says petulantly before sliding into a chair.

Dr. Culpepper puts two finger again his wrist, but then drops it, looking up. “Oh my god. It’s her.”

A hush falls over the crowd, and Hera follows Culpepper’s gaze to the doorway, where Captain Isabel Lovelace stands casually.

“Hi gang.”

“I have been following all the articles, and also a few fashion blogs dedicated to her,” Culpepper whispers. “She is  _ so  _ cool. Do you think she’d talk to me?”

“Uh, yeah,” Eiffel says with a perplexed look on his face. “She’s not  _ that _ scary, and I say this as the man who was once almost blown up into itty-bitty pieces by her.”

“I am going to go.” Hera slips away through the crowd towards Lovelace without waiting for their response.

“Hi,” she says.

“Hello, Hera.” Lovelace says. Her voice sounds good in person, not through the station speaker, or through the TV. Low, and even, and hiding something like Mona Lisa’s smile.

“You did everything you could,” which wasn’t what Hera meant to start with, but there it is.

“I still failed,” she replies with a shrug.

“I’m sorry,” Hera says uselessly.

“It’s fine. It’s not over.” Lovelace closes her eyes, breathes out. “I don’t know how. Or when. But I will  _ never  _ stop coming for those bastards.”

“If anyone could find a way it is you,” Hera says truthfully, “I will help. In any way I can. And I know the others will too.” She thinks of Koudelka’s determination a few days ago. Of her own messy tangle of feelings and resolve.

“I heard about Rhea. That she is…gone. For sure.”

Lovelace gives a bitter laugh. “Even if he erased her back then, I had hoped that somewhere, some _ how _ a version of her still existed. Now the only survivors are me and— Selberg. Hilbert. Whatever.”

“We don’t know where he’s gone or what happened.”

“He’s still alive. He always survives. He is like me, like that,” she says firmly.

“About Rhea?” Hera starts.

“Yeah?” A slight edge of tension. Of waiting for an accusation.

“I was wondering, could you tell me what she was like?”

Lovelace softens, “Yeah. I could do that.”

**57**

They had been talking for almost an hour when the music abruptly changed again, the happy pop beat being replaced by the sound of a slightly distorted acoustic guitar.

Lovelace mouth pulls into a reluctant smile. “‘Across the Universe,’ that’s kind of funny really,”

“Oh no,” Eiffel announces with mock horror, approaching them. “How did this slow song ever get on the playlist?”

Hera rolls her eyes, but can’t suppress a grin as well.

“I apologise captain, but I need to borrow your conversation partner.”

Lovelace raises a lofty eyebrow. “Be my guest.”

Eiffel makes a dramatic flourish towards Hera. “May I have this dance?”

She takes his hand.

He leads her to the center of the dance floor. “Within your mental library of three hundred types of dancing, did you have anything thing pertaining to the sacred rite of the Junior High dance?”

She shakes her head, confused.

He gives her a playful smile. “Easiest dance there is,” he says, putting her hands around his neck and resting his own on her waist.

“Now what?” she asks.

“Traditionally, now we rock back and forth while slowly moving in a circle.” They start to move to the beat. “If we wanted to  _ strictly _ follow my eighth grade experience, there would also be an angry old prune of a math teacher telling us to ‘leave room for Jesus.’”

They both look over at Minkowski and Koudelka who are not so much dancing as engaging in a very sloppy dance floor make out.

“Apparently someone didn’t get that memo,” he chuckles.

Eiffel pulls her a little closer. Gently, like she is made of glass and not of steel and metal, like he is worried she will push him away. She doesn’t. She actually wishes that he would use her to support more of his weight if he wasn’t going to use his crutches.

John Lennon is singing. Nothing is going to change his world. The world seems to shrink to this dance floor, the soft light and the gentle harmonies of the guitar as it progressed to a minor IV chord.

She wonders what eighth grade Eiffel was like. Probably never shut up. Probably the class clown. She remembers the picture of college aged Eiffel they had flashed on the news. All unruly hair, dubious fashion choices, and big smiles. 

She didn’t exist when Eiffel was fourteen. She didn’t exist when he was in his twenties. It seems unfair, to be thrown headfirst halfway into these people’s lives. They have so much history, years and years of birthdays, funerals, successes and failures before she was written into being. Time wears and etches itself into their biology, bit by bit. 

Sørensen said she could maybe live forever. Till the end of their lifetime. Time enough to make something new, make something with her own hands. She was real, she was valid. This was not artificial.

His cheek brushes her hair as they move out of the way of another pair of dancers.

“I have decided,” she says.

“Hmm?”

“I know what I want to do next. Where I want to go with my life.”

She hears a small puff of air as he laughs softly.

“Then I do too.”

**58**

They tumble through the doorway to Hera’s apartment, laughing. Eiffel is a slightly boozy mess of limbs and crutches, and Hera herself feels strangely giddy.

“Where is the light switch?” Eiffel asks, groping at the wall.

“Ah, allow me,” Hera says expansively. She snaps her fingers, and the lights flicker on, the landline announces she has no new messages, and the stereo starts playing David Bowie’s  _ Life on Mars. _

“Very cool.” Eiffel says with sage nod. “Very Skynet”

He flops onto the couch dramatically, letting the crutches fall to the floor with a loud clatter.

He smiles at her. She looks back at him. She sits carefully beside him. It’s now or never.

“Listen. Eiffel… Doug. I—I don’t know what this is yet, but, you know that I am a machine. It’s real to me, but I thought you should know that I might not like you in the same ways that you like me. That a human girl would like you. We are different.”

“Sweetheart. I wouldn’t wish you any different than you are. Not one bit. Most days I am happy that you like my annoying accident-prone self at all. It’s real to me too.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah.”

“When I said  _ like  _ I meant—“

“I know.”

The both looked at the laps trying to hide secret smiles. Eiffel was faintly turning red, and Hera could feel her circuits sing as a happy burst of electricity filled her.

“Do you want to watch a movie?” she asks.

“The fact that you think that I  _ might  _ say no is an affront to me,” Doug laughs.

Later, after Jurassic Park, Star Wars, and a handful of episodes of Red Dwarf.

After Doug Eiffel has gone to sleep in a heap on the sofa.

Hera stands in front of a canvas, with an array of (non-irradiated) paints in front of her. She picks up a brush and twirls it experimentally. She is tired of painting Wolf 359, of painting some distant, uncaring star.

She looks at the earth’s own star rising, filling the sky with delicate pinks and blues as the world rotates to face it once more.

She looks at Doug, sleeping peacefully still.

To make art. To make with one's own hands.

It’s time to paint something new.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for everyone who followed along with my weird experiment in world building and AI feelings. Just an epilogue left now!


	10. Ten

**60**

A while later, on a mild morning where the air was still fresh from the rain, Doug Eiffel is in the middle of explaining his theory on how the  _ Die Hard _ and  _ Battlestar Galactica _ universes might be interconnected when she leans over and kisses him. He kisses back as if he has been waiting weeks, maybe years, maybe since the beginning, to do this.

“Oh,” he says.

“This is how humans who love each other express affection, is it not?” She is playing the naïve AI  card a little harder than necessary. She has watched six seasons of the sitcom F.R.I.E.N.D.S. with Koudelka, and all the Austen adaptations twice. She know what kissing is.

“Uh, yep. Sure is. I just didn’t know…you know...because you’re a robot,” he says sounding a bit strangled.

“It is a strange feeling, but I am trending towards rating it as a positive experience.” She smiles innocently. “More data points should be acquired before I make a final judgement.”

“More… _ data points?  _ Oh my _ god,  _ I’m being played.” He headbutts her shoulder affectionately. “You’re the worst, I hate you,” he adds, ridiculously fond.

 

**61**

They have one last Hephaestus reunion in Houston, albeit without Hilbert.  Eiffel still pours one out for him, earning a long lecture from the waitress at the restaurant.

At one point there is a silence, and Doug slides his hand into Hera’s. 

Lovelace fixes her with a  _ look _ , before looking at Minkowski who, in turn, is gazing happily at her husband.

“Oh dear god. I am the fifth wheel. I have been tricked into tagging along on your gross double date,” she says, deadpan.

“You know I know a nice radiological engineer that I could set you—“

“Please, do not finish that sentence,” Lovelace groans, sinking deeper into her seat.

 

**62**

They move to California.

The roads are lined with tall straight white-bark pine and Douglas firs, and there are small brown houses, surrounded by grasslands and small brown horses. The rental car traces the shadow of Lassen Peak, and farther off, the Cascades rise out of the earth like giants.

Doug stands at the center of town which so far as they can tell consists of a post office, a fire hall, and a small diner with a “CLOSED PERMANENTLY” sign dangling off its screen door.

He gives Hera a baleful look, “I can’t believe I am  _ willingly _ living in a pizza-less town.”

 

**63**

The autumn brings cold rain to northern California, and Doug Eiffel learns how to make pizza.

“This is too much power,” he tells Hera as he cuts the pineapple into neat slices. “I am Icarus flying too close to the sun.”

“Uh-huh,” Hera says from the couch. The lenses in her eyes are being sluggish to switch to a macro function, and it’s making reading this small technical manual a  _ pain.  _ Why couldn’t all information be digitized and easily uploadable?

“Seriously pizza making is like, god powers. With these hands, I bestow the perfect cheese-to-ham ratio upon this crust.”

“God-hands, got it,” Hera hums, not looking up.

“Crap, I think I forgot to preheat the oven,” he says, pausing in his pineapple chopping.

“I did it ten minutes ago,” Hera says, flicking her eyes upward and giving him an impish half smile. “With  _ my robot brain _ .”

“You are such a good life partner,” Doug says, delighted.

 

**64**

And people talked. People always do.

“Oh? That’s just old spaceman Eiffel, and his robot lady-friend. They are an odd pair, but they’re harmless. She is very clever and polite for a robot sort. He’s a talkative fellow. A bit annoying when he gets going really _ , _ ” the postmaster tells travellers passing through.

“I’m not old,” Eiffel tells Hera, mildly offended. “Why does he always feel the need to specify that?”

 

**65**

He celebrates his birthday. They get a dog, which Doug calls Terry II and Hera calls Turing. The earth travels halfway around the sun, and she celebrates her birthday on the longest day of the year. The dusty sunset finally gives way into a sky full of stars.

“Where?” he says, and she knows what he means. She scans the sky. The points of light with all the colours she can no longer see but knows are out there.

“There,” she says, pointing. “But you can’t see it without a decent telescope.”

Wolf 359. It too is still out there. All things great, and terrible, and beautiful, and sad that had happened on that station, now not even a speck of light.

He holds her hand tightly, as if to reassure himself that she is really here, really corporal.

 

**66**

She doesn’t paint stars. She paints the ocean and crocuses in the spring and protein strings. Landscapes and the topographies of circuit boards. She paints Eiffel asleep on the couch cast in red light from the Netflix home screen.

She paints abstracts, swirling greens and blues and reds.

 

**67**

_ (The click of a record button being pressed. The ambient noise of distant people, and finally the clearing of a throat.) _

Eiffel: This is the log of former communications officer Doug Eiffel, live from the Redding Municipal Airport.  My shrink, Dr. Effendi has been harassing me for weeks to take up journaling, and when I told her diaries were lame and too much like paperwork she said—

_ (a pause as he stops to make air quotes) _

Eiffel:  _ (in a bad impression of his female therapist) _ “Well, why don’t you just use a voice recorder instead? You can’t tell me you’re not comfortable with that, some of those logs have been made public through the Freedom of Information Act and I know there are  _ hours  _ of you singing Abba complete with rude modifications to the lyrics alone. Also, I am a jerk who will not let my patient take mints from the bowl on my desk because apparently they are _ decorative mints _ or something.”  _ (drops impression) _ Well, she is  _ not wrong.  _ About the recording my thoughts thing. Totally wrong about the decorative mints. 

_ (the sound of him moving in his seat) _

Eiffel: I suppose given the whole… _ thing… _ with the star, it would be a bit odd to refer to an audience of ‘dear listeners’ when recording this. Hmm. Well…friends? Friends. Dear friends. It’s been five years since my last log, but it feels like yesterday. But  _ also _ like a thousand years ago at the same time? Life is weird like that I guess.

Eiffel: I suppose you want a Entertainment Weekly style “But where are they now?”. Well, unless you have been living under a rock you know what Senator Lovelace is up to. Namely breaking hearts and taking no prisoners up on Capitol Hill in the name of scientific ethics. If she can’t dismantle Goddard into itty bitty pieces with her own hands, she will burn the earth to prevent any similar groups from forming.

Eiffel:  _ (chuckling) _ Though at least  _ someone _ got Cutter. He was turned into Interpol overseas, after someone shot him in both kneecaps. If you are thinking that I am taking a certain amount of schadenfreude from that you would be  _ totally right.  _ I don’t know if it was somehow Lovelace or Hilbert or _ someone else  _ he pissed off, but good on them.  

_ (a last call for boarding a flight to Los Angeles echoes over the PA system) _

Eiffel: I haven’t heard much from Hilbert. I think he has a lot of stuff to work through, and a lot of science left to do, but every once in awhile I get a postcard. No message or return address, but always postmarked from Moscow and usually with a cat motif? Which I  _ think  _ is his dry attempt at humor, though it’s hard to tell with that man.

Eiffel: Minkowski, on the other hand, cannot not  _ be  _ stopped from checking up on me, not even by being back in space. She keeps space-telephoning me from the International Space Station II, to ask me if I am eating a balanced diet and actually getting sunlight. Which I am now healthier than I have maybe ever been actually? Decima free for me, cross my heart and hope  _ not _ to die from respiratory shutdown. She doesn’t believe me though.  NASA’s poor long distance bill.  Whatever, she is  _ so _ excited to be part of this experiment. “Raising a family in low orbit.” Apparently it’s all very important research to determine the viability of future of humanity and future generations in space, blah blah blah. She is just super jazzed to have her poor husband and round little space babies in orbit with her. The babies have little uniforms. It is  _ literally  _ the most Minkowski thing ever.

Side note: I  _ cannot believe  _ she wouldn’t name  _ either _ of the twins Doug.

_ (the low rumble of a plane flying low overhead) _

Eiffel: Koudelka is adjusting to life in orbit. I mean he looks sort of terrified all the time, but that could also be the crush of fatherhood and related possibilities? And he got that book done.  _ Lovelace’s War  _ will probably be on the bestseller list for the next year I bet. They really took the time to rip Goddard a new –

_ (the end of the sentence is cut off by another announcement) _

Eiffel: Hera, Lovelace, Koudelka, Minkowski. They are all willing to wait in the tall grass for Goddard, for some incremental step towards justice and restitution. I am just…tired. I am pretty happy just to live out my life in peace. Maybe it’s for the best that we all fade into obscurity and that it’s Lovelace who tells our story. She makes a filibuster look damn good. And she is driven. Like  _ intensely driven.  _ Like she has an Arya Stark-style list of names, and she will shank every one of those vultures. She deserves to be the hero of this little drama, I think.

Eiffel: Not that  _ no one  _ cares about the Doug Eiffel story. I have a invitation next week to be on StarTalk to talk about the effects on my body of being in space waaay too long, A.I rights, and my current job with Neil deGrasse Tyson.  _ No big deal _ . I am  _ not _ nervous. _ Nope _ . Totally cool as cucumber about it. Not pestering my wife for tips because _ she  _ has been on the podcast  _ three  _ times already, being a super cool Hephaestus survivor/A.I designer _.  _

Eiffel: Which, she should hopefully be home from in a few minutes.  She is in San Francisco four days a week, and then takes a short-hop flight back Redding and then we drive back to Hat Creek. I am working at the radio observatory there for SETI. They are  _ really  _ hoping that I can work some magic and pull alien music or even spooky LITERAL Star Talk out of the airwaves again. Well, I am trying. I have had a lot of practice scanning the night sky one small vector at a time. .

Eiffel: Hera works for JPL with her scientist friends. Who, incidentally, got married a couple of years ago. I  _ totally _ didn’t cry during the ceremony, that was all Koudelka. Elsewhere in San Francisco, her AI pal, MABEL, is actually the new congressperson for Silicon Valley and Lam is her chief of staff so that is cool I guess.

_ (a pause) _

Eiffel: There’s Hera. I can see her coming in through security now.

Eiffel: God, she is so perfect.

Eiffel: I love her so much my teeth hurt. This was worth everything. One day of this was worth all the crap that got us here. And that is  _ a lot  _ of crap.

Hera: Doug? What are you doing?

Eiffel: Nothing, here let me take your suitcase. Holy moley -- that is heavy. What is in it?

Hera: Experimental plutonium batteries. So don’t shake that bag too much, I am going to tinker with them over the weekend.

Eiffel:  _ Oookay. _

_ (The click of a button being pressed and then the recording ends.) _

 

**68**

Someone has written yet another think pieces a magazine cover. “Robot Love: Can AI Feel Human Affection?”

Hera rolls her eyes.

Maybe she doesn’t. Maybe the algorithms and coding that bind her to Doug Eiffel are not analogous to human love.

But she wants this every day, for as many days as she has. She wants every bit of happiness that she can pull from the universe for them. She want Doug Eiffel, who has had an unfair share of bad things, to experience as little pain as possible.

She wants their life to move onward together, getting better and more complete in small and hard-to-quantify ways.

She wants to be his home, like she has always been.

It maybe not be human love, but it’s enough.

It’s what she has made here.

She puts his head on his shoulder and listens to the wind blow through the tree branches.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There is an extended FAQ and notes at my tumblr (http://buhtpatrol.tumblr.com/) !
> 
> Thank you all so much for reading. I hope you had half as much fun as I did writing it!


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